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I doubt very much that
cats, those from C S Lewis's Narnia excepted, can
truly speak, although cat-sounds are more diverse
and more meaningful than Lewis Caroll suggests.
What I don't doubt is that there are a number of
cats having a jolly good attempt - whether in
Turkish or any other tongue. What is worrying
though, is when I am doing the evening shift at a
cat shelter and I am convinced that I can hear
someone talking, even though there are no other
humans, only cats, in the vicinity. So far none of
the cats have owned up!
Have Cats
Evolved to Communicate with Humans?
While not claiming that cats have acquired the
power of human speech, in 2002, a Cornell
University researcher investigated whether cats
vocally manipulate their humans. Nicholas Nicastro,
a graduate student working under psychology
professor Michael Owren at Cornell University's
Psychology of Voice and Sound Laboratory said that
cats were obviously very dependent on people for
their needs and that they may have evolved to
become better at managing and manipulating people.
While domestic cats may not know language, his
study suggested that cats, which have lived
alongside humans for thousands of years, have
adapted their "meows" to better
communicate with humans.
One way Nicastro attempted to prove his theory
was by analyzing a range of domestic cat
vocalizations, playing these back to humans and
then screening people's reactions to each type of
sound. He did the same using the calls of wild
cats in order to compare domestic cat and wild cat
"speech".
He recorded more than 100 different meows from
12 domestic cats (2 of them his own), soliciting
various sounds from the cats by placing them in
different situations (with their owners' help
since cats rarely co-operate with strangers).
These situations included delaying feeding time,
before feeding them, putting them in empty rooms
with the recorder, brushing them beyond the
animals' patience for brushing and simply
recording the contented meows of cats in a good
mood.
Nicastro played the recordings to two sets of
people. The first group of 26 people was asked to
rate each meow in terms of how pleasant each
sounded. The second group of 28 people rated the
sounds in terms of urgency. He compared people's
ratings with acoustical analysis of the meows and
found a clear pattern.
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