If you have a cat, you may spend a lot of time carefully watching your feline friend, trying to work out whether they are happy and content. Perhaps they are trying to tell you that something is amiss? How would we know? There are many online articles, YouTube videos and social media experts who will happily tell you how to speak ‘cat’. Cat lovers all over the world are always keen to create a more meaningful connection with their cat. 

But did you know that your cat is just as eager to make that same connection with you, and to learn how to speak ‘human’?

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A new study from Japan has shown that cats are quickly able to form a link between pictures and words, possibly even faster than a human baby.  Does this new study suggest that cats are quietly taking in more information than we might realise?  

The research

The study looked at the reaction of 31 adult cats when they were shown pictures at the same time as hearing a made-up word. The cats were placed in front of a screen and were shown one of two pictures. Each picture was given a made-up word. And this word was spoken by a recording of the owner’s voice while the cat was observing the image. The cats were shown the picture and heard the corresponding word between four and eight times. After that, the experimenters felt the cats would be habituated to the word and its picture, and it was time to test what they had learned. 

Then, the pictures and words were switched around

The experimenters observed the cat’s reaction to look for signs that they were confused by the change. It appeared that they were, as the cats spent longer looking at the screen after the words and pictures became muddled up. The experimenters felt that this indicated the cats were able to form picture-word associations. In some cases, the cats only needed to be shown the picture and word together briefly, for just nine seconds in two trials for each picture-word pair, in order for them to have made a connection. Although studies in human babies have followed a slightly different formula, 14-month-old children had at least four 20-sec trials for a picture-word pair. So this new study may indicate that cats are even faster than babies at making these associations. 

There are some limitations with this study to bear in mind

For example, does the extra attention paid to the switched screen mean that cats really are wondering why the wrong word is being used? The experimenters only tested a small number of cats. We also don’t know whether the cats retained the information for any length of time following the experiment. Repeated exposure to word association is probably needed over a long period of time for cats to truly ‘learn’ a word’s meaning.  

It may not be news for some cat owners that their cat can do this though

If we say the word ‘dinner’ and follow this up with food enough times, a cat will soon learn that the word generally means they will be offered something to eat. This is known as ‘operant conditioning’. Actions that are followed by reinforcement will be strengthened and more likely to occur again in the future. Equally, negative past experiences also result in an increased likelihood of avoiding those behaviours in the future. B. F. Skinner believed children learn language through operant conditioning, with “rewards” for using language in a functional manner. There are reasons to suppose that pets sharing our home may also be rewarded for this type of learning too, and therefore might be motivated to pay attention to our behaviours closely. 

While it’s long been understood that dogs are capable of following human verbal instructions (‘fetch’ being the classic example), not much is known about whether cats possess the same abilities at interpreting our language. 

Feline communication

What we do know is that vocalisation is rarely used as a communication tool between cats themselves. True, they will yowl aggressively at each other if facing each other down in a confrontation, but that is at the extreme end of the conversation. Mostly, they communicate in silence. Cats are a solitary species, and their wild ancestors would live independently, apart from one another. Cats today retain these innate characteristics and have not evolved the kind of language skills that can readily be shared at close quarters. Facial expressions, laughter, and speech are not necessary when you are rarely in the company of members of your own species. 

Instead, cats communicate primarily through their sense of smell

Pheromones create a chemical signal and serve as a daily bulletin board for other passing cats. Cats produce pheromones from specialised glands in their chin, lower ears, forehead, cheeks, tail, rear, back, and paw pads. The messages transmitted through pheromones influence the behaviour, interactions and emotions of cats. Cats will leave pheromone signals through rubbing or bumping their head or body against an object (or you!), by scratching or by spraying urine. 

But cats are smart enough to realise that we humans (providers of food, affection and comfort) are not influenced by the kind of language that cats may use on a day-to-day basis. Pheromones are not detectable by our inferior human nose. And we’re not that good at picking up on a cat’s preferred subtle body language cues. So, in order to get what they want, cats have had to learn to play the game our way. 

Recently, more work has been done looking at how cats interact with humans, and how this differs from the way they interact with other cats

For example, cats communicate with humans by holding their gaze and using slow eye blinking as a sign of familiarity. This is not a behaviour that cats usually engage with between each other, as direct face-to-face communication can typically indicate aggressive intentions. Also, tail-up displays are rare among cats but common when cats approach humans. 

Cats may also have developed a particular ‘meow’ purely for our benefit

The meow is a method of communication that is used between a mother cat and her kittens, so it’s not a completely new behaviour. But there is some evidence to suggest that domesticated, pet cats deploy their meow very differently to feral, unsocialised cats. A study published in Behavioural Processes in 2011 found that pet cats will meow more frequently than feral cats and they direct this behaviour solely towards humans.

This suggests that cats have developed this method of communication especially for us, their caregiver, and over time, we’ve reinforced this behaviour by our positive response to it. And who can resist a plaintive and soulful meow, given with direct eye contact and perhaps even accompanied by a body rub around our legs? Of course, you are going to share your snack or open the food cupboard earlier than you had otherwise planned! Cats have effectively trained us to respond to a method of manipulation that they’ve realised has the most reliable positive result. 

So perhaps cats really can speak human better than we can speak cat? 

If you’d like to learn how to communicate better with your cat, Cats Protection have created an informative video to help you interpret their body language. You can also find more hints and tips to unlock your cat’s inner emotional world on the charity’s website too. 

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