Purpose In their letter, Meister et al. (2020) appropriately point to a potential influence of stimulus type, arguing cochlear implant (CI) users may have the ability to use timbre cues only for complex stimuli such as sentences but not for brief stimuli such as vowel–consonant–vowel or single words. While we cannot exclude this possibility on the basis of Skuk et al. (2020) alone, we hold that there is a strong need to consider type of social signal (e.g., gender, age, emotion, speaker identity) to assess the profile of preserved and impaired aspects of voice processing in CI users. We discuss directions for further research to systematically consider interactive effects of stimulus type and social signal. In our view, this is crucial to understand and enhance nonverbal vocal perception skills that are relevant to successful communication with a CI.