Elephants are so clever they use their famed memory to be discriminating listeners of humans.

WASHINGTON — Dr. Seuss had it right: Horton really does hear a Who. Wild elephants can distinguish between human languages, and they can tell whether a voice comes from a man, woman or boy, a study says.

That’s what researchers found when they played recordings of people for elephants in Kenya. Scientists say this is an advanced thinking skill that other animals haven’t shown. It lets elephants figure out who is a threat and who isn’t.

The result shows that while humans are studying elephants, the clever animals are also studying people and drawing on their famed powers of memory, said study author Karen McComb.

“Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with,” said McComb , a professor of animal behavior and cognition at the University of Sussex in England.

“Memory is key. They must build up that knowledge somehow.”

The study was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s close but not quite like the Dr. Seuss book, where the empathetic elephant Horton hears something that others can’t hear.

McComb and colleagues went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming in conflict over scarce water. The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. The recordings contained the same phrase in two different languages: “Look over there. A group of elephants is coming.”