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A new study suggests that our feline companions can even learn to associate the words we use for particular objects or images, and they pick this up faster than our own babies do.– findings that led cognitive scientist and first author of the new study, Saho Takagi from Abazu University in Japan, to wonder whether they are"hard-wired" to learn human language.
The team gave the word test to 31 adult pet cats, by putting each one in front of a laptop showing two short cartoon animations, while an audio track of the cat's caregiver saying a made-up word was played. When the cats tired of this, they were given a break before the next round, in which the images and audio were played four more times, with a slight tweak: half the images had the 'wrong' audio.
The babies, for example, were given only one-syllable words, and they were spoken in a range of intonations by an unfamiliar speaker. The cats, on the other hand, heard three-syllable words spoken by their own caregivers in a somewhat exaggerated manner.
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