Hearing one's own voice shapes explicit agency via retrospective influence, while implicit agency relies on sensorimotor comparison

People instantly recognize their own voice during speech, and this self-generated auditory feedback helps shape their sense of agency (SoA), the conscious perception of themselves as agents of their speech acts. Although the role of sensorimotor mechanisms in SoA is well-established, how hearing one’s voice relates to this process remains unclear. We investigated the retrospective influence of self-voice identity on the implicit feeling and explicit judgment of agency using a key-press paradigm in which pressing a key triggered a participant’s recorded voice. Our findings reveal that self-voice has little or no retrospective (or prospective) influence on intentional binding, an implicit measure of SoA. In contrast, explicit agency ratings were significantly higher when participants heard their natural voices than when they heard their pitch-distorted voices. This dissociation offers crucial insights into the impact of self-voice identity on the multifaceted mechanisms that construct SoA for the self-referential act of speech.