DECRYPTION – Although they seem to have nothing to do with it, they are sensitive to the human voice and understand that it is they who we are talking to.
Slumped on the couch, totally impassive, barely deigning to move his ears when you speak to him, your cat doesn’t seem like it… but he listens to you. He even pays attention to what you tell him. But if someone else addressed him in exactly the same terms, he wouldn’t listen. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Charlotte de Mouzon, ethologist at the Ethology Cognition and Development Laboratory (University of Nanterre) and published in a journal of the Nature group, Animal Cognition.
«A study conducted previouslyt allowed us to highlight that cat owners changed the way they spoke when they addressed their animal», explains the scientist. Very often, more than the words, what characterizes the language intended for cats is a change of intonation with a higher tone and a particular melody, a bit like when we speak to babies.
Like dogs, cats seem attached by a special bond to the humans who take care of them on a daily basis.
Charlotte de Mouzon, ethologist at the Cognition and Development Ethology Laboratory (University of Nanterre)
“So we wondered if cats were particularly sensitive to this language…
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