Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right

Even he would not go as far as Scott Moisik, a researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, whose studies have thus far focused on human voices — but whose ears pricked up when he heard what Sawallis’s group found.

“When I hear a cat on YouTube produce a vocalization that very much sounds like ‘oh long Johnson,’ ” he said in an email to the Associated Press, he wonders how far back down the evolutionary tree our path to speech began.

He told The Washington Post that he hears in house pets not just vowel qualities but intonation, syllabicity, rhythm “and, amazingly (especially in the case of cats) some consonantal strictures.”

“However these animals do it . . . one cannot deny there are properties in their vocalization that are approximating human speech,” Moisik wrote. “Someone needs to take the time and really do the analysis.”