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Using a habituation/dishabituation procedure, near‐term foetuses (36‐39 weeks gestational age) were tested in a low variability HR state, to examine whether they could discriminate between a male and a female voice repeatedly uttering the same short sentence. Prosody and loudness of the two voices were controlled. Once the foetal heart rate (HR) habituated to the first voice, the effect of a second voice was investigated in two experimental conditions: male/female voice and female/male voice. HR variations after the onset of the second voice were compared to those occurring in two control conditions in which the same voice was presented twice (male/female voice and female/female voice). Highly conservative statistical criteria taking each subject's pre‐stimulus HR variability into account showed that most foetuses exposed to the voice change displayed decelerative cardiac changes, with no significant …