Cats Can Learn Human Words Faster Than Babies, Study Suggests

Cats have shared human homes for roughly 12,000 years, apparently taking careful note of the ways we communicate.

New research indicates that our feline companions can connect words with specific objects or images. What is more, they appear to acquire these links more quickly than human babies.

Earlier studies have found that cats can interpret human pointing, identify who belongs to their group, judge whom they can rely on and recognise who provides their food. They are also known to respond to their own names.

Cats may also learn the names of familiar people and other cats. These findings prompted Saho Takagi, a cognitive scientist at Abazu University in Japan and lead author of the new research, to ask whether felines are "hard-wired" to acquire human language.

"I was very surprised, because that meant cats were able to eavesdrop on human conversations and understand words without any special reward-based training," Takagi told Christa Lesté-Lasserre from Science.

Cats and human word learning

Whether cats can ‘learn’ other human words in the same way as dogs, however, has remained uncertain.

Takagi and her team therefore assessed cats’ language skills using an experiment previously employed to examine language development in 14-month-old babies. In that work, infants began to associate words with objects after only 16 to 20 repetitions.

The researchers tested 31 adult pet cats. Each cat was placed in front of a laptop displaying two brief animated cartoons, accompanied by recordings of its caregiver saying an invented word.

In the first animation, a unicorn-like character grew and shrank while the cats heard their owner say ‘keraru’. The second featured a red-faced sun that expanded and contracted, paired with the nonsense word ‘parumo’.

"In a study of human infants, infants received at least four 20-second trials for a picture-word pair," the authors write.

"Most cats habituated to the stimulus pairing after four trials, which means that they received only 9-second exposures in two trials for each picture-word pair."

Picture-word associations in pet cats

Once the cats had become bored with the sequence, they were allowed a break. During the following round, the images and recordings were each presented four more times, but with a small alteration: half of the images were matched with the ‘wrong’ audio.

Although the habituation period was brief, the cats appeared puzzled when they noticed an incorrect pairing. On average, they watched the screen for 33 percent longer when this occurred.

The findings, the researchers write, "demonstrate that cats can rapidly form picture-word association".

"Some cats even gazed at the screen with their pupils dilated during the 'switched' condition," Takagi told Science. "Cats pay attention to what we say in everyday life – and try to understand us – more than we realize."

Why cats and babies cannot be directly compared

The tests imply that cats may form links between human words and pictures more rapidly than babies, but several important differences between the 1990s infant experiment and this study prevent a direct comparison.

For instance, the babies heard one-syllable words spoken by an unfamiliar person using varied intonations. By contrast, the cats listened to three-syllable words delivered by their own caregivers in a slightly exaggerated style.

Whatever species learns words more quickly, the ability of cats to identify human word-image associations remains striking.

The authors say that more research into whether these abilities are common across species or unique to certain animals could broaden our understanding of cognition and communication between species.

The research was published in Scientific Reports.