The study investigated the leakage potential of different voice and speech cues using a cue isolation and masking design. Speech samples taken from an earlier experiment were used in which 15 female students of nursing dissimulated negative affect produced by an unpleasant movie or told the truth about positive af[ect following a pleasant movie. Several groups of judges rated these speech samples in five conditions: (1) forward or clear, (2) electronic filtering, (3) random splicing, (4) backwards, (5) pitch inversion, (6) tone-silence sequences. The results show that vocal cues do indeed carry leakage information and that, as reflected in the differences among the conditions masking different types of cues respectively, voice quality cues may be centrally" implicated. In addition, gender differences in decoding ability are discussed.The question of whether deception can be detected on the basis of a variety of behavioral cues provided by the deceiver has sparked a sizable number of studies in the past decades. First tried to assess the possibility of using polygraph methods for lie detection (Orne, Thackray, & Paskewitz, 1972;Lykken, 1974;Podlesny & Raskin, 1977). Then the interest of psychologists studying nonverbal behavior was awakened by Ekman and Friesen's (1969) seminal article on "nonverbal leakage and clues to deception." Initially attention was directed primarily to nonvocal aspects of behavior, particularly the face and the body (Ekman & Friesen, 1974). More recently, the vocal channel of communication has been studied intensively in terms of its potential for the detection of deception (see Scherer, 1981; Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981, for overviews).In many studies of the nonverbal behavior of deceivers, the instruments of detection were naive human observers who were presented with samples of deceiver behavior in different channels of communication (such as audio, visual, or audiovisual combined). The purpose of these studies was to assess the degree to which a particular channel leaks information about deception (Ekman, Friesen, & Scherer, 1976;Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, & Scherer, 1980; DePaulo, Zuckerman, & Rosenthai, 1980). Contrary to cue measurement studies in which objective coding methods are used to determine the covariation of deception with particular facial or vocal cues (see Ekman & Friesen, 1974;Ekman, et al., 1976;Scherer, 1979Scherer, , 1981, the observer-attribution method makes it difficult to isolate the particular cues that carry the leakage and that allow observers to attribute deception correctly. One approach to identifying potentially significant cues is to use cue-masking and isolation methods (Scherer & Scherer, 1982). The masking of content in speech has a venerable history in vocal communication research (Starkweather, 1956) and has since been further refined (See Scherer, 1982).In the collaborative study reported here, many of the available masking and isolation techniques for vocal cues were used with the same set of speech samples from a study investigating ...