We are naturally drawn to friends and colleagues with familiar voices, scientists have found.People prefer those who have a similar accent,intonation and tone of voice to themselves , they discovered. Previous research has focused on how masculine or feminine a voice sounds.Men with deeper voices and women with slightly higher voices were thought to sound more attractive,because they suggest a bigger or a smaller body. But the new study,published by a linguistics expert in Canada,suggests there is a more complex mechanism at play.Dr Molly Babel, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, said,"The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity.Very few things in our voices are changeless,so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person's shape and size.'' She recorded 30 volunteers' voices and asked each to rate the others' attractiveness on a scale of one to nine.Each participant was from western America,with similar accents.The people we assessed were all in the same dialect group,but they showed that dialect to different degrees. "We seem to like people who sound like we sound,we like people who fit within what we know,"Dr Babel said.She also found that breathy voices in women-typified by the famous American actress Marilyn Monroe-were seen as more attractive. The breathy tone,caused by younger and thinner vocal cords ,implied youthfulness and health A creaky voice,suggesting a person has a cold,is tired or smokes,was seen as unattractive.The participants preferred men who spoke with a shorter average word length and deeper voices. The linguist,whose work is published in the journal PLOS One,said,"Once you're outside of a certain range of familiarity,novel and exotic sounding voices might become more attractive.We also have to keep in mind we find some accents more preferable than others because of social fixed ideas." Dr. Molly Babel mentions Marilyn Monroe in order to  _  .
evaluate a creaky voice explain her new findings challenge previous research promote the actress's reputation