The Role of Voice Evaluation in Voice Recall

This chapter examines the relationship among a suite of voice evaluation metrics—vocal attractiveness, voice typicality, gender categorization fluency, intelligibility, acoustic similarity, and perceptual similarity—in a set of 60 American English voices with the goal of understanding how these evaluation metrics predict listeners’ abilities to accurately recall voices. This question of what makes a voice memorable has been studied from a range of perspectives, as it raises critical theoretical issues about auditory memory and phonetic encoding, in addition to having applied concerns in the context of earwitness testimony. We find that the more subjective voice evaluation measures of stereotypicality and attractiveness predict listeners’ ability to recall voices more so than the more objective measures related to voice similarity and processing. These results suggest that listeners’ cognitive organization of voices is influenced by social assessments of voices.