Research overview: the phonetics and prosody of cat meows

Phonetic research has begun to dissect the structure of cat vocalizations as if they were speech-like sounds, examining pitch contours, vowel-like qualities and prosody. This overview surveys work, including projects analyzing the melody and intonation of meows and related calls, that describes how cats modulate pitch within a meow and how these patterns may correlate with context or emotional state. It considers whether cats develop dialect-like differences and how owners and cats may converge on shared communicative conventions. The survey frames the meow as an acoustically rich, modifiable signal that cats deploy chiefly toward humans, and it discusses methods borrowed from human phonetics that allow fine-grained description of feline calls, opening the possibility of decoding what different meow patterns convey.