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A phonetic pilot study of vocalisations in three cats

Author

Summary, in English

538 vocalisations from three domestic cats were collected and used in a phonetic pilot study in order to test some recording and anal- ysis methods normally used with human speech. Based on auditive analysis, the vocalisations were categorised into five types and analysed for duration and F0. The most common type was a combined murmur and miaow. Similar mean type durations were found in all three cats. Mean, minimum and maximum F0 showed an overall high variability, due to the large number of intonation patterns used in each type. One might speculate that cats signal para- linguistic – perhaps even linguistic – infor- mation by varying their F0. Neither the record- ing techniques nor the analysis tools used here were judged to be optimal for cat vocalisations. Future work includes a larger study of cat vo- calisations, including intonation and formants, with adapted recording and analysis methods.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

45-48

Publication/Series

Proceedings from FONETIK 2012

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

University of Gothenburg

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Conference name

FONETIK 2012

Conference date

2012-05-30 - 2012-06-01

Conference place

Gothenburg, Sweden

Status

Published

Project

  • Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-91-637-0985-2