Left-handed voices? Examining the perceptual learning of novel person characteristics from the voice.

This article investigates how listeners can learn to recognize a novel person characteristic—handedness (left-handed vs. right-handed)—from voice cues, a topic previously unexplored outside voice identity perception. Through four experiments manipulating acoustic properties of male voices, specifically fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal tract length (VTL, indexed by the second formant F2), participants were trained to categorize handedness and subsequently tested on novel voices. Results showed that listeners could learn to distinguish handedness from voices with above-chance accuracy across all acoustic manipulations, using both diagnostic cues and non-diagnostic acoustic properties, indicating perceptual biases likely shaped by long-term exposure to natural voice variations. The study highlights that auditory category learning for person characteristics involves integrating acoustic information in ways influenced by prior experience and suggests multiple perceptual strategies among individuals. This work opens new avenues for researching how novel social categories are formed from voice perception beyond identity recognition, while noting the need for future studies with more ecologically valid stimuli.