Cats may be able to learn human words | Hacker News Reader

Cats may be able to learn human words

nautil.us

50 pointsdnetesn57 comments

For some prime direct examples of cat language comprehension, look at YouTube videos of cats set up with talking buttons. Most will pick up the basics like "food" and "play" easily, and some will actively use dozens of words to communicate as well as basic compound ideas (like "mad" "outside" when it's raining).

Yep! If you have a food motivated cat, they can pretty easily pickup tricks - My cat knows sit, shake, speak, up, and 360. Not sure if higher lever words/concepts such as, it’s raining outside, are making it through.

How did you train “speak”? One of our cats can do sit, high five, and 360 but I wouldn’t even know where to start getting them to speak!

We just had a hand signal plus saying speak while holding a treat until she meowed at us, Then we gave it to her.

I don’t actually recommend this, because it’s basically training them to always yell for food haha. And trying to train her to shush has yet to work.

Anecdotally, we have multiple pets of which four are cats and they all know their names and generally respond or come if called. (Unless seriously napping, of course)

My cat might be listening to me, but he isn't doing what I tell him to do ...

That's because he is cat. You don't tell cat. You ask cat. He does what he wants. If it looks like he's doing what you want, then that's just a coincidental aligning of his wants with yours. Your pleasure of his doing what you want is your gleeful misunderstanding of the situation.

I think it's noteworthy when science "discovers" things that are common knowledge within a particular interest group.

Like the one mentioned in the link below from 2019 that is commonly cited as one that shows cats are capable of "love". As a lifetime cat owner I thought this was common knowledge.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cats-really-do-ne...

The world is full of things that were once considered common knowledge, but are now considered silly or downright wrong. Science is exactly in the business of finding out which parts are actually true and which aren't, whether someone believed it before or not is rather irrelevant.

This is a very insightful comment and something that I wish was observed more often.

I’ll differ only a little in that as a good Bayesian I’ll submit that science is about improving the rigorous basis for our worldview by attempting and failing to falsify explanatory hypotheses.

Maybe that’s a nitpick, but I suspect that science would be held in better regard if us nerds were a bit more careful about saying what is and isn’t true or false on the basis of science, which is not a particularly scientific way to talk (of which I’m as guilty as anyone).

Yea, seriously. My cat is 15 and she is pretty intelligent. She knows about a dozen verbal commands and I’ve noticed over the years will perk up or come out of nowhere when certain words are used. She also will respond and (usually) come when you call out her name like a dog. It did take a very long time though, like 5-7 years and a lot of trust established to get to this point, but I think it’s been fairly obvious for a long time now that cats are very habituated to humans and human habits, maybe even as much as dogs.

One of the difficulties for science when studying cats is they are so aloof and take time to build trust, that observing these behaviors in a study setting is pretty hard. Even mine will totally understand what I’m saying (her ears will perk up and twitch) but she’ll ignore me sometimes.

Anecdotally, my cat's definitely know the word "Greenies" for their favorite treats.

Fairly recently, I was calling one who was napping to let her know I was about to dispense them. She woke up, lifted her head, perked her ears and watched me when I called her name. She was clearly paying attention but not moving from her spot. Then I said the magic word and the reaction was startlingly immediate - she leapt up and ran right to me, then followed until I got them out and poured some out.

> whereas other groups have shown that cats follow human pointing

Thinking about the ones that don't seem to understand pointing... I'm imagining Professor Farnsworth's Fing-Longer [0], so you start out poking things, and gradually make the substance more transparent. Eventually, you don't need it because the animal assumes there's more beyond your visible finger...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT593tu0Rlo

Our 11-year-old Bengal cat basically converses with us. You call her, she'll respond or just look at you, acknowledging that she heard you, but reacting is completely her choice.

Sometimes, she brings us gifts. IF, she likes someone, she might give them a gift, and she will bring it to that person, you'll know it's for you, not anyone else.

When we are eating, she will query us. We need to either share with her, or let her sniff, to let her make sure, we are not eating something tasty without her.

She'll bring toys, if she wants to play, or a pot if she needs water, she'll nudge you to things that she wants.

Other 5 cats, understand each of their names, but nowhere near close as smart as her. Still, I saw one trying to open the cabinet where we store cat foods (he did that several times already, I was not sure which one was doing it), I am looking for ways to keep that cabinet closed :|

I think it's something to do with my wife, she has some magic with animals, with her love and caring

How well animals can learn human words could depend on how attuned their hearing is to EQ curves in the frequency ranges that articulate vowels, and such. To some animals that hear well into ultrasound, human speech might just be a low-frequency jumble.

According to some cursory web searches can supposedly hear past 60 kHz, possibly as high as 85 kHz, with a particular sensitivity in the 8 kHz region. That, to humans, is the start of the "air" frequencies where the sibilant sounds of speech are found.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42021040

Isn’t it obvious that an animal that knows the sound of its prey (like a mouse scurrying or squeaking) can associate particular sounds with objects? Or as another example, I have a laser pointer that makes a sound when I switch it on. When my cats hear that sound, they instantly start scurrying around looking for the little dot of laser light to chase.

Hey mods, can we update the title here to "Your Cat is Listening to You"? That's the actual title.

my cat 100% knows the word “hungry”

My cat knows that one, along with "treat" and "snack". But in the way that it was (probably falsely) claimed that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, my cat really does understand dozens of variations of the word "no".

There's "no", there's "No", there's "No!", there's "NO!", there's "NO!!!! NO!!! NO!!!", and many other variations each with slightly different connotations that my cat definitely picks up on.

> ...that my cat definitely picks up on.

By ignoring all those variations until you grab the critter by the scruff of its neck (or any other body part within reach) and pull it away from its intended target - why otherwise would it have learned such a crescendo of no's?

>> By ignoring all those variations until you grab the critter by the scruff of its neck

His pronouns are he/him/his, not its, and I don't grab him by the scruff of his neck, I use the water bottle technique.

Off-topic and sorry: this must be a new record, I have never seen website sharing data with 1581 partners.

Me neither, because I use uBlock Origin.

1581 partners hate this one trick!

> 1581 partners

Amateur hour. Peter North has over 2,000 acting credits.

Kidding aside; I have seen more than 1600 partners listed before. I just close the tab.

Reading the title, I thought this was going to be about a backdoor in the Unix program...

That'd be a bit of a non-sequitur as cat would not be of much use if it weren't for its ability to use its ear [1].

[1] see /dev/stdin or &1 - cat only listens in mono

My assumption was something like environmental variables - how much a simple command like cat is listening to your computer

How is this not common knowledge? Anyone who ever interacted with a cat knows they learn words. Cows, horses and other mammals do too.

> How is this not common knowledge?

There is a lot of stupid common knowledge, from fan death to cold weather causing colds.

There’s also common knowledge that’s not wrong, like the fact that gravity exists and that cats learn their own names

> the fact that gravity exists

Gravity was famously misunderstood through various common knowledges for millennia. Birds, clouds and stars each confounded theories.

That's separate and somewhat irrelevant to the practical understanding that things do fall down to earth when dropped.

>cold weather causing colds

That's true, though.

Please explain how

Cold weather creates the social and somatic conditions that increase the effective infectiousness of viruses.

Increased mucous production leading to higher transmissibility? more time spent indoors? drier air (that one was new to me) we don't actually know the mechanisms exactly, but there's some causal vector between cold weather and colds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#weather

Colds are more frequent in cold weather due to increased proximity and transmissibility. Bundling up better when outdoors won’t protect you against a cold.

oh I forgot the old wives tale was literally direct exposure rather than the season

Yup! I really think my cat understands words. But he might be picking up on body language, or randomly iterating through a short list of behaviours until he gets a response. Human nature, closely studied, is unintuitive. I have to assume feline nature might be too.

I grew up with cats and was entirely unaware that they had the capacity to learn names. Respond to words, sure, but it never seemed to matter what I was saying.

Cats May Recognize Their Own Name - It Doesn't Mean They Care:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-may-recognize...

That reminds me of a similar study I read about via the front page of HN, just recently

I have been allowed to consider myself a colleague (at best, ordinarily: an associate) by many cats - you do not get to be an owner of a cat: that's an affectation!

I have also loved and been loved by many dogs too. I am not a dog OR cat person - I am AND. When me and the wife met in 2003, she had two dogs and I had two cats. They all lived out their days together happily.

I can't speak for horses and cows - limited personal exposure. I think that the relationship between humans and cats and dogs are rather different. I'm not too sure that cats really learn words in quite the same way that dogs do.

Cats are far less "domesticated" than dogs. Apart from real killers, when was the last time that a dog delivered a disembowelled small mammal/bird/reptile to you and requested your approval?

If you have a few 100 (or 1000) years to spend, why not start off with a population of lions (which do live in prides and are hence pack animals) and breed them down to domestic cat size and somehow domesticate them.

Now compare them with dogs.

I've never communicated with a cat using words - bloody daft! OK I do speak at them out of habit but I use high pitched sounds when "communicating" and never look them in the eye. I've rarely met a cat I could not convince to come on over and be stroked.

>I have been allowed to consider myself a colleague (at best, ordinarily: an associate) by many cats - you do not get to be an owner of a cat: that's an affectation!

As the old saw goes, "Dogs have owners. Cats have staff." And truer words were never spoken!

I love cats but they are fucking daft.

It's time for us (you, actually) cat owners to rise up and reclaim (y)our world.

>It's time for us (you, actually) cat owners to rise up and reclaim (y)our world.

I'll need to consult the boss and my employment contract, but I don't believe that's within my purview.

Most of the cats I have had were extremely intelligent... a couple more than any dogs I've ever known - but they're just so damned lazy. I think they just consider whether it's worth their time and just go back to napping.

Bear in mind that cats are highly trainable, but most people don't understand how. They aren't as easily trained as a dog because they (cats) have different motivations.

Not helpful. Obviously, cats learn words. The question is, how do we get them to give a fuck about what we're saying?

Why is it obvious that they can learn words?

I've had cats for years and its obvious once you spend enough time with them. My cats clearly know their names for one. We've experimented by chatting with the cats in the room, and when you drop one of their names in the middle of a sentence their ears perk up.

That doesn't prove they know words, I tend to pronounce my cats' names in exactly the same way each time. Maybe they're used to the notes I'm making, or my body language, or something else other than the word itself.

I don't know if my cat's ears will perk up if a stranger says their name, which is a test they have to pass to be considered to understand words.

One of my cats is named Cricket, if I talk about feeding crickets to a lizard she looks at me and talks back even though I used different intonation.

If anyone says our other cat's name he gets a look of oh no they noticed me and runs away.

I agree and then some. My cats know food, lunch, treat, toy, mouse(which is both a toy and the name of one of the cats), no, out(both outside and please leave the room), go home, up(get up on the bed or my lap), off(get off the dang counter/table for the 1 millionth time). They multiple name for themselves and the name of the other cats. They know that when I whistle I'm calling them.

Now if only they would do as well as hear more often...The Siamese talks back when I use words she doesn't want to hear and sometimes curses me.

Science is often in the business of verifying things people think are obvious.

Cats are highly individualistic, and they all have their own motivations for doing things that go beyond simple treats. Dogs will go to great lengths for treats, but cats won't usually.

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