WEDNESDAY, May 29, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Let's be purrfectly clear: Your feline friend probably doesn't have the language skills to ask that the can of sliced salmon be placed neatly on a bed of baby greens, but cats do tend to use the same types of sounds repeatedly to get you to do what they want.
That's the conclusion of a recent Cornell University psychology study that looked at the meowing habits of a dozen felines.
"Cats communicate with humans on an emotional level; it's not a language," says study author Nicholas Nicastro, a doctoral student in Cornell's psychology department who also owns two cats.
Nicastro recorded more than 100 different meows from 12 different cats. He played the sounds back to a group of 54 volunteers and asked half the group to rate the meows for "pleasantness" and the other half to rate "urgency" on a scale of one to seven.
Meows rated as pleasant tended to be shorter without a lot of variation. Urgent meows lasted longer, and more emphasis was placed on the end of the sound.
"If cats want to affect how people hear them, they have the tools to do this," Nicastro says.
He suspects these communications have evolved during the 5,000 years humans and cats have been living together. It also shows that cats clearly use sound to get humans to do their bidding -- such as opening a can of food.
In a related study, Nicastro had people try to guess the circumstances of the meow. People who had a lot of experience with cats performed only slightly better than those without the cat credentials.
He said cats often use the same sounds repeatedly in the same situation, such as when begging for dinner. However, he emphasizes it is not language because cats don't know the specific meaning of their meows.
Others aren't so quick to dismiss the kitty communication idea, however.
"We can't always understand what they mean, but it's a huge leap to say they don't know what they mean," says a Los Angeles veterinarian, Dr. Jean Greek, who shares her home with six cats.
She says that if you saw deaf people signing to each other, you wouldn't know what it meant, but you couldn't say it wasn't a language.
Of course, cats don't have the same kind of vocabulary humans do, she adds, but if they make the same meow night after night when they want to go out, it would seem the cat knew what it was "saying."
Nicastro will present his findings at the Acoustical Society of America's meeting on June 5 in Pittsburgh.
What To Do
If you'd like to hear how some of the different meows sound, go to the Cornell University.
For more on the human-animal bond, read the results of this survey from PetEducation.com, which found almost 90 percent of pet owners believe their animals understand at least some of what they say.
