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The process of controlling the content of speech extract has proven to be more difficult than the elimination of non facial cues in photographs. Thus the findings of experiments that did not control this factor lead to misleading conclusions regarding the voice recognition over the face recognition. For example, in an experiment it was found that 40% of the time participants could easily pair the celebrity-voice with their occupation just by guessing. In order to eliminate these errors, experimenters removed parts of the voice samples that could possibly give clues to the identity of the target, such as catchphrases. Even after controlling the voice samples as well as the face samples (using blurred faces), studies have shown that semantic information can be more accessible to retrieve when individuals are recognizing faces than voices.

Another technique to control the content of the speech extracts is to present the faces and voices of personally familiar individuals, like the participant's teachers or neighbors, instead of the faces and voices of celebrities. In this way alike words are used for the speech extracts.For example, the familiar targets are asked to read exactly the same scripted speech for their voice extracts. The results showed again that semantic information is easier to retrieve when individuals are recognizing faces than voices.

Another factor that has to be controlled in order for the results to be reliable is the frequency of exposure. If we take the example of celebrities, people are exposed to celebrities faces more often than their voices because of the mass media. Through magazines, newspapers and the Internet individuals are exposed to celebrities faces without their voices in an every day basis rather than their voices without their faces. Thus, someone could argue that for all of the experiments that were done until now the findings were a result of the frequency of exposure to the faces of celebrities rather than their voices.

To overcome this problem researchers decided to use personally familiar individuals as stimuli instead of celebrities. Personally familiar individuals, such as participant's teachers, are for the most part heard as well as seen. Studies that used this type of control also demonstrated the face advantage. Students were able to retrieve semantic information more readily when recognizing their teachers faces (both normal and blurred)rather their voices.

However, researchers over the years have found an even more effective way to control not only the frequency of exposure but also the content of the speech extracts, the associative-learning paradigm. Participants are asked to link semantic information as well as names with pre-experimentally unknown voices and faces. In a current experiment that used this paradigm, a name and a profession were given together with, accordingly, a voice, a face or both to three participant groups. The associations described above were repeated four times. The next step was a cued-recall task in which every stimulus that was learned in the previous phase was introduced and participants were asked to tell the profession and the name for every stimulus. Again, the results showed that semantic information can be more accessible to retrieve when individuals are recognizing faces than voices even when the frequency of exposure was controlled.