Typicality effects on memory for voice: Implications for earwitness testimony

Abstract The effects of voice typicality on voice recognition were examined. In an incidental task, participants were presented with consonant‐vowel‐consonant stimuli (with varying vowels) spoken by voices rated as high‐typical or low‐typical. One week later, they were brought back for a surprise voice recognition test where the target voice was presented along with low‐typical and high‐typical voice distracters. The results indicated that voice misidentifications occur, with many errors due to confusions of high‐typical voice targets with high‐typical target voices. The results show that voice typicality affects voice recognition accuracy and is an important factor to be considered in real‐life earwitness testimony situations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.