Psychologists dissect the multiple meanings of meow

COX NEWS SERVICE

CAT lovers like Linda Davis of Atlanta have long thought their pets could talk. Now research shows they're right -- in a way.

Davis is convinced her cat CB does talk, sometimes in meowlike words. She insists she's not crazy.

"If I hold up an egg, I'll say, 'Say egg,' and she'll get the guttural 'g' sound," says Davis, 51. "I don't see how people can think that cats don't communicate with us. They don't meow just to make noise."

Cornell University researcher Michael Owren, co-author of a newly published study on cat vocalization, says it's not surprising cat owners think like Davis.

Owren is one of 2,000 psychologists gathered this week at the American Psychological Society's annual convention that ends Sunday in Atlanta. Researchers will consider hundreds of topics, ranging from what people look for in mates and soul mates to the best ways to flaunt attractiveness to the opposite sex.

Owren studies cats for clues about the roots of human speech and says that after 10,000 years of living with people, cats have evolved into con artists, learning what sounds get results and using different meows to manipulate their owners.

"Cats have evolved after thousands of years of cohabitation with humans to be able to influence the behavior of people by producing sounds that draw our attention," Owren says. "It's not language. It's not like a cat's meow is a word. But rather they are producing sounds that have an auditory impact on humans."

Fred Salmons, a 55-year-old business consultant, considers himself perfectly rational. But he's also convinced that he and his wife, Carol, know what their cat, Smokey, is saying when she meows.

"We know the difference between her meow for petting and for food," he says. "Petting is quiet and accompanied by purring." Smokey's plea for food is "louder and more urgent than any other meow she makes."

Psychologist Stuart Vyse of Connecticut College, an expert on why people can believe in things that seem weird, said owners of felines may well learn to understand their cats, but that they also "may be the human imposing an interpretation on something that has no meaning, or a different meaning."

It's the acoustic properties of cat sounds and human reactions to them that form the basis of how cats convey specific meanings to people, says Owren. Similarly, our ancestors likely used crude laughs before developing more sophisticated ways to convey feelings, like speech.

Researchers in Owren's lab compiled a sample of 100 vocalizations from 12 cats, and recordings were played for 26 people, who rated each sound for pleasantness and appeal on a scale of 1 to 7. The same 100 cat calls were played for 28 others who were asked to indicate how urgent and demanding the sounds were. Owren and his lead researcher, Nicholas Nicastro, say listeners responded fastest to the most pleasant meows, just as primeval humans must have.

The meows rated as more urgent or less pleasant were longer, "with more energy in the lower frequencies, along the lines of 'mee-O-O-O- O-W,' " Nicastro says. More pleasant, less demanding ones "tended to be shorter, with the energy spread evenly through the high and low frequencies. These sounds started high and went low, like 'MEE-ow."'

Listeners were correct 27 percent of the time in figuring out what the cat calls meant, far better than the 20 percent that would have been expected by mere chance, an impressive indication that felines are pretty good communicators.

Owren's research didn't look at how cats communicate with other cats, which is somewhat of a mystery, because they seldom meow to each other. It's likely, he says, they learned to meow only to get what they wanted from humans.

His study is published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Comparative Psychology.

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