Previous studies have suggested that female voices may impede verbal processing. For example, words were remembered less well and lexical decision was slower when spoken by a female speaker. The... Show morePrevious studies have suggested that female voices may impede verbal processing. For example, words were remembered less well and lexical decision was slower when spoken by a female speaker. The current study tried to replicate this gender effect in an auditory semantic/associative priming task that excluded any effects of speaker variability and extended previous research by examining the role of two voice features important in perceived gender: pitch and formant frequencies. Additionally, listener gender was included in the experimental design. Results show that, contrary to previous findings, there is no evidence that a lexical decision of a target word is slower when spoken by a female speaker than by a male speaker for female and male listeners. Additionally, the semantic/associative priming effect was not affected by speaker gender, neither did female mean pitch or formants predict the semantic/associative priming effect. At the behavioural level, the current study found no evidence for a gender effect in a semantic/associative priming task. Show less