Acoustic classification of domestic cat meows

This study recorded meows from domestic cats across behavioural contexts and analysed their acoustic structure, also testing whether human listeners could assign calls to context. Meows were acoustically variable and only weakly tied to specific situations, and naive listeners classified them poorly, though experience improved accuracy. The authors argued that the meow is a learned, individually variable signal shaped largely by interaction with humans rather than an innate context-specific call, consistent with the idea that adult cats meow chiefly to people. The work is a foundational reference for the claim that cat-human vocal communication is built through shared learning.