A Large Part Of Housecat Vocalisation Toward Humans Isn’t Goal-directed Communication, But Rather,

A large part of housecat vocalisation toward humans isn’t goal-directed communication, but rather, affiliative signaling: a simple call-and-response protocol which establishes that the participants are part of the same social unit. Amongst themselves, most housecat affiliative signaling is non-vocal, but humans aren’t really physiologically equipped to respond to such signalling in a feline fashion, and cats, well, they’re adaptable.

Which is to say that when your cat yells, and you yell back, so the cat yells again, and so forth, what you’re really saying to each other is “hiiiiii~”.