"Cat Speak"

"Meow!" As cat owners, we hear it every day, often many times a day. But what does it mean? Well according to Dr. Nicholas Nicastro, we understand its meaning more clearly than we might think. Nicastro wrote his PhD thesis in psychology at Cornell University on humans' ability to understand the meows of cats. 

Nicastro recorded hundreds of meows made in real-life situations between cats and their owners. Then he had unfamiliar listeners (some who had cats and others who didn't) listen to the recordings. "In one experiment, I asked them to classify the context to when the meow was produced. For instance, is this a food call or is this a 'get away from me' call? In the second experiment I asked them more general questions. Does this call sound pleasant? Does this call sound urgent or demanding?" Nicastro explained. 

It turns out that cat owners were pretty good at understanding what the cats were trying to communicate with their meows. "People who had no experience with cats did poorly. People who had some experience with cats, owned cats, or had lived with them did significantly better," said Nicastro. The cat owners were able to correctly interpret 40 percent of the meows; twice as many as those who did not have cats. However, humans' ability to interpret communication from another human speaking the same language is between 95 percent and 98 percent, so we have a long way to go before people are fluent in "Cat Speak." 

What do these meows mean? Nicastro found there are different types of meows people can identify, and they have different general meanings. "What I found was there are certain acoustical qualities that correlate with something sounding pleasant or sounding urgent, and I speculate that the cats can use these acoustical changes to manage our impressions of how their meows sound to get what they want out of their human caretakers," said Nicastro. 

Urgent calls sound unpleasant, demanding attention. Calls that sound pleasant don't seem urgent. "Angry or antagonistic meows tend to be longer in duration and friendly calls tend to be a little shorter, and that correlates with the idea of pleasantness," said Nicastro. In addition, angry or defensive calls have a lower pitch, while friendly calls have a higher pitch. The theory is that lower pitch calls make cats sound bigger and more threatening, while higher pitch calls make them sound small and helpless -- which is attractive to humans. 

Meowing is an attempt by our cats to communicate with us (and only us; they don't meow to other cats), and it seems that we have the ability to understand what they want -- if we're listening.

 

 

Beth Adelman is a Certified Feline Behavior Consultant and the former editor in chief of Cats magazine. She is the author of the award-winning book Every Cat's Survival Guide to Living With a Neurotic Owner.
 

For Some Students, Teacher's The Pet 

 

By RACHEL GOTTLIEB

Courant Staff Writer

February 17, 2005

 

Kenya Harris is stretched out in the story corner in a 

classroom at Annie Fisher School and struggling to sound out 

the word "thin." She sticks with it, then finally she gets it.

 

After working so hard, no one would blame the 8-year-old 

first-grader for feeling trepidation as she turns the page. 

Just then her audience, a cocker spaniel named Manti, puts 

an end to the page-turning. He flops out on the book for a 

nap.

 

Kenya is thrilled. After a giggle, she slides the book out 

from under Manti and turns the page with a fresh sense of 

optimism and cruises right through the next few pages. Manti 

snuggles close, his blasé attitude taking the fright out of 

reading.

 

Manti and his owner, retired kindergarten teacher Daphne 

Wilcox, have been meeting individually with four 

first-graders since November to help them improve their reading skills. 

The theory is that struggling readers might be embarrassed 

to read in front of a class or even a teacher but that the 

dog provides a comforting, nonjudgmental audience.
 

Kindergarten teacher Jennifer Fanning got the idea last 

spring when her mother-in-law sent her a picture of a child 

reading to a dog that ran in a North Carolina paper. On a 

little note, she wrote: "Thought you might get a kick out of 

this."

 

Fanning was thrilled, but not by the novelty of it. "I 

said, `Oh, my gosh, we've got to do this in Hartford,'" Fanning 

said.

 

So she spent the summer researching the program, which 

started in Utah in 1999 when Intermountain Therapy Animals 

launched its Reading Education Assistance Dogs - R.E.A.D. - 

program. Since then, the program has caught on in libraries 

and schools throughout the country and in Israel, Japan, 

Canada and Singapore.
 

Fanning said she believes that Annie Fisher is the first 

school in the state to try the program, run locally under the 

name "Tails of Joy." The main idea is for students who are 

behind in reading to get some practice and enjoy the 

experience. Dogs don't correct or judge - although Wilcox does 

coach the readers through tough spots.
 

It's obvious that the youngsters enjoy sitting with Manti - 

even when he closes his eyes and lies down for a snooze. 

Kenya doesn't perceive any disrespect from Manti when he 

appears to be sleeping. She thinks he closes his eyes to help 

him concentrate. "He sounds out the words inside his mind. 

He likes to listen to people read so he can learn the words."

 

Chieyon Wilson-Williams, 6, interprets Manti's relaxed 

stance as proof that he enjoys the stories. He confesses that 

he was a little afraid of Manti when he first met the dog, 

but now he trusts that the dog won't bite him.
 

Chieyon's grandmother, Connie Wilson, who volunteers at the 

school, said that Chieyon's sessions with the dog have 

helped draw him out of depression brought on by the death of 

his baby sister.

 

"It's helped him a lot," she said. "At home, we see a 

change in him. Everything has picked up. He just got very quiet 

and now he's just out there."
 

While Wilcox, of Simsbury, coaches, she uses Manti to coax 

children to try harder - alternately asking students to 

sound out or define words for the dog.

 

Fanning said that teachers were at first skeptical and 

worried that the children might be afraid of the dog. But 

Wilcox and the dog attended a staff meeting and the teachers 

were set at ease. They selected students from their classes to 

read to Manti.
 

The success of the program might be hard to measure through 

test scores.

 

But if the comments of Elvon Coleman, 7, are any gauge, 

then the program is a hit. "I like reading to Manti because he 

always likes seeing me."

 

Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant