# Interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and referentiality in child-dog play: A pluridisciplinary approach

Rea Peltola, Yaru Wu, Marine Grandgeorge

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## To cite this version:

Rea Peltola, Yaru Wu, Marine Grandgeorge. Interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and referentiality in child-dog play: A pluridisciplinary approach. Language and Communication, 2025, 10, pp.126-148. 10.1016/j.langcom.2025.04.006. halshs-05059729

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Submitted on 21 Nov 2025

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# Interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and referentiality in child-dog play: A pluridisciplinary approach

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Rea Peltola<sup>a, *</sup>, Yaru Wu<sup>a</sup>, Marine Grandgeorge<sup>b</sup>

## ARTICLE INFO

**Article history:**

Available online 7 May 2025

**Keywords:**

Child-dog interaction

Play

Interpersonal distance

Referentiality

Perspective-taking

Sound patterns

## ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to explore how interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and human language are synchronized to construe meaning within interspecies play projects. The data consist of video recordings presenting 4 child-dog dyads in ecological French-speaking contexts. The study combines ethological methods, phonetic analysis, and cognitive-linguistic analysis. The paper shows that physical contact and proximity characterize child-dog play and affect children's vocal behaviour. Adjustments in interpersonal distance are conditioned by ongoing play projects. In plays including hidden or out-of-reach objects, proxemic adjustments, sounds, and language structures construe referentiality and perspective-taking.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## 1. Introduction

This pluridisciplinary paper investigates the interplay between adjustments in interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and linguistic construal in play interaction involving domestic dogs and 8-11-year-old human children.<fnref n="1" /> The aim is to observe how these three modalities form synchronized patterns of interspecies meaning construction. To get there we must first elucidate the overall proxemic and phonetic properties of child-dog interaction.

The paper addresses the following questions:

1. Are there differences when comparing children and dogs in terms of proxemic adjustments?

2. Does interpersonal distance influence children's speech delivery?

3. What kind of processes of meaning construction can we identify when looking at proxemics, sound patterns, and linguistic construal within the play interaction?

As for most mammalians (Sharpe, 2018), playing is an essential part of dogs' and humans' lives. They engage in playful interactions not only with conspecifics but also across species boundaries. Dog-human play activities that have been investigated so far mostly involve adult human individuals (e. g. Mitchell and Thompson, 1991; Simonen, 2023). Yet, child-dog play is known to be frequent and beneficial for interspecies bonding (Jalongo, 2015; Melson, 2018). Human children have been

<footnote><sup>a</sup> CRISCO UR4255, UNICAEN, Normandie Univ, France</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup> CNRS, EthoS (Éthologie Animale et Humaine)—UMR 6552, Univ Rennes, Normandie Univ, F-35000 Rennes, France</footnote>

<footnote>This article is part of a special issue entitled: Interspecies Interaction published in Language and Communication.</footnote>

<footnote>* Corresponding author.</footnote>

<footnote>E-mail address: rea.peltola@unicaen.fr (R. Peltola).</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ When symmetrically coordinated, the noun phrases referring to different species are given in alphabetical order.</footnote>
observed to display more variability in their animal-oriented behaviour and seek more physical contact than adults (Mertens and Turner, 1988). Contacts with dogs and other companion animals are considered to favour the development of empathy (Prato-Previde et al., 2022) but how this concretely happens in interaction remains largely unexplored.

Different *play projects*, i.e., goal-oriented actions that the playing partners are engaged in (Mitchell and Thompson, 1991), entail proxemic adjustments (Horowitz, 2009; Mitchell, 2023). However, dogs and humans may not perceive physical proximity similarly. Humans have been found to seek closeness in situations where dogs perceive it as unpleasant (Walsh et al., 2024). Millot et al. (1988) observed that 2- to 5-year-old children approached dogs with gestures, movements, and voice much more frequently than dogs approached them. This was considered to be a manifestation of children taking more initiative in spontaneous child-dog interaction. However, there is evidence that, at least when interacting with adult humans, dogs take initiative, too (Mondémé, 2020), including in play (Mitchell and Thompson, 1991; Simonen, 2023). In Cornips' et al. (2023) data, humans moved towards a cat as a response to the cat's initiative to orient the human's attention to something. In this case, approaching did not stem from human's initiative-taking but quite the contrary.

Both human adults and children are reported to talk to other animals (Mitchell, 2001; Grandgeorge et al., 2014, 2021). Dog-directed talk conveys prosodic signals that dogs identify in combination with dog-relevant content words (Benjamin and Slocombe, 2018) and different types of mouth sounds, such as imitative growls (Mitchell, 2024) and non-imitative lexeme-like tongue clicks (Szčepełek Reed, 2025). In human-to-human speech, acoustic features are known to vary according to distance (Brungart et al., 2002).<fnref n="2" />

In addition, the embodied cognitive-semantic properties of human language structures indicate how the human partic-
ipant construes the on-going situation and treats the other participant's behaviour within the interaction. On all these
grounds, human language can be considered as one of the semiotic modes contributing to interspecies interaction. In a
biosemiotic and post-anthropocentric vein, we approach language as a process of *languaging* (Demuro and Gurney, 2023) and
linguistic meaning as a dynamic structure that is deeply rooted in meaning-making beyond human. Meaning emerges as
living organisms interact with their living and non-living environment (Johnson, 2018).

Semantic approaches to other species' vocal and bodily cues have rarely been tested in linguistic literature, as *meaning* has been reserved for certain types of units found in human languages. Cornips et al. (2023) have, however, paved the way for experimenting with methods developed for analyzing human linguistic reference, as they depicted cat's human-oriented sound productions, gaze and body movements as deictic cues.

In this paper, we put *meaning* and *referentiality* to the test of multimodal child-dog interaction. Proxemic adjustments and orally articulated sounds that we call *mouth sounds*<fnref n="3" /> are investigated as part of dog-human meaning construction, together with human verbal forms. *Referentiality* is here understood as a property of those vocal and bodily activities that the children treat as calling the interlocutor's attention to something observable or otherwise shared in the situation. Referentiality is considered as *local* when we cannot, in the light of our data, show that the referential forms are used and shared outside the analyzed situation.

The following hypotheses are raised:

1. Children display more behaviour entailing physical closeness and contact than dogs.

2. Children calibrate their vocal delivery according to the interpersonal distance with dogs.

3. Proxemic adjustments, sounds, and human language structures form synchronized interactional patterns within which local referentiality can emerge.

The data consist of video recordings of child-dog dyads at their homes. The analysis is threefold. The first part investigates interpersonal distance and its adjustments in play and no-play contexts through data sampling. The second part presents quantitative observations concerning human speech delivery and its variation in terms of proxemics. The third part zooms into three specific microscenes where canine and human proxemic adjustments and mouth sounds are observed alongside linguistic expressions. This analysis is conducted in a cognitive-semantic framework, and it deals with personal and demonstrative proforms<fnref n="4" /> as well as other spatial expressions. These categories contain elements that are used for inter-subjective meaning construal, because they operate a shift in the perceptual center (the *origo* of conceptualization) (Verhagen, 2005). The selected sequences are not representative of all types of child-dog play interaction. They include hidden or out-of-reach object play which is liable to generate complex meaning construction, as the participants share orientation toward the object that is somehow absent.

In addition to these empirical objectives, the paper takes on an interesting yet demanding challenge as it combines
methodologies from three different fields: ethology, phonetics, and semantics. It tackles the question concerning the role that
qualitative approaches could play alongside quantitative methodologies, opting for "a productive relationship and interplay
characterized by mutual respect, reinforcement, and benefit", as expressed by Kortmann (2021: 1221). The aim is to identify
the potential of our pluridisciplinary framework. Studies on interaction between humans and other animals, which inherently

<footnote n="2">² On the development of acoustic properties of speech, see Lee et al. (1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ We leave the question concerning the lexeme status of these mouth sounds open. The sounds studied here are certainly less conventionalized than those investigated by Szčepełek Reed (2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Proforms are not only pronouns but also e.g. broadverbs such as là ‘there’.</footnote>
demand several types of expertise, offer a promising environment for gaining concrete experience of collaboration across scientific fields with shared interests.

## 2. State of the art

### 2.1. Making meaning in interspecies interaction

There exists a potential common ground that ethology and animal studies in the Humanities can lean on when approaching interspecies interaction. Von Uexküll's (1965) theory of *Umwelten*, i.e., the perceptual and semiotic worlds of living organisms, offers a framework for understanding why living beings behave and develop in such diverse ways, as well as for recontextualising human language in a network of meaning-construction that goes beyond human (Peltola, 2021; Demuro and Gurney 2023). Within *Umwelten*, individuals perceive and make sense of their environment, including other beings. An *Umwelt* is formed by the species-typical perceptual and bodily properties of the organism living in it, but it is also modified by individual experiences and interactions with the *Umwelten* of other organisms (Buytendijk, 1952: 38; Magnus, 2014: 380). The evolution of a specific *Umwelt* is rooted on the evolving mutual relations with other worlds (Tønnessen, 2022).

The *semiosphere* (Kull, 1998) formed by interacting *Umwelten* is marked by a diversity in forms as well as graduality in semiotic properties and intercomprehension. Systems of communication are influenced by one another, so that species living in close and long-lasting contact, such as dogs and humans (*companion species*, see Haraway, 2008), have developed "a complex system of interspecific communication", grounded on attachment and mutual benefits (Miklósi and Topál, 2013: 288). Dogs are particularly competent in reading human social signals (Hare and Tomasello, 2005), including those entailing referentiality, such as pointing or gaze shifts (Miklósi and Topál, 2013).<fnref n="5" /> There is evidence that dogs can track human perceptual experience (Lea and Osthaus, 2018; Huber and Lonardo, 2023). Furthermore, human speech is a highly relevant interactional cue for dogs. They are able to detect auditory regularities in human vocal delivery and associate these with emotional states (Siniscalchi et al., 2018).

Human languages are a particular type of mode for interacting which has developed within the human *Umwelt*. There are other modes, some of them humans share with other beings, whereas some are not entirely or at all available for humans. The concept of *languaging* highlights the plural and processual dimensions of languages and other systems of communication (Demuro and Gurney, 2023; Cornips and van Koppen, 2024). This biosemiotic and post-anthropocentric approach to language and interspecies interaction (Pennycook, 2018; Peltola, 2021; Cornips, 2022) problematizes the sharp distinction between semiosis and linguistic meaning construction.

There is solid evidence of the role played by prosodic properties of human linguistic productions in the organization of interspecies interaction. Humans can display reciprocity through prosodic modification (Harjunpää, 2022). Prosodic patterns can also be used for getting the other animal's attention (Mitchell, 2001) and for designing talk in parallel to multiple but distinct interlocutors (Szczepek Reed, 2023).

Alongside the prosodic dimension, semantics can be addressed in interspecies interaction, although this has rarely been dealt with. The semantic approach does not entail that participants share identical interpretation of signs, nor that interaction would necessitate linguistic meaning construction at all (cf. Goode, 2007: 129). However, when there is shared understanding of any kind, it is relevant to study on which semiotic ground it is rooted. A cognitive linguistic approach (e.g. Langacker, 2015; Johnson, 2018) reveals the embodied dimension of linguistic meaning, which is particularly manifest in iconic and indexical relationships. In doing so, it shows the close connections between linguistic meaning construction, perception, and other embodied modes of interaction. It also makes manifest the degree to which the human participant construes the situation as intersubjective (Verhagen, 2005). Excluding human language from studies dealing with interspecies interaction contributes to maintaining its status as a system separate from others that cannot be analyzed on the same grounds. At the same time, it is possible to keep in mind the structural characteristics that are common to human languages, and that are related to the degree of grammatical complexity and symbolic meaning (see also Jääskeläinen, 2025). This is why we distinguish between verbal productions and mouth sounds. This dichotomy does not imply hierarchy but gradual difference, and it does not mean that non-verbal is non-human, nor that we exclude the existence of different types of complexity in the languaging of other species.

Concerning dogs, based on studies conducted on their close relatives, wolves, there is evidence of a sophisticated system of vocal communication conveying information on the vocalizer, including their inner state, and the context of vocalization (Faragó et al., 2014). The main domestic dog vocalizations are barking, growling, howling, and whining (Sibiryakova et al., 2021). Compared to wolves, dogs bark more and in a richer array of contexts, because of their shared history with humans. When playing with humans, dogs also display a special laughter-like panting sound (Volsche et al., 2023). Instead of being exclusively affective, some dog sounds also carry local referential information, meaning that the vocalizations are linked to different elements present in the situation (participants, objects) and not (only) to the emotional state of the vocalizer (Faragó et al., 2010).

<footnote n="5">⁵ Mitchell et al. (2018) observed that dogs displayed less responses to pointing in play interaction than otherwise. This suggests that dogs' responses to human referential signals are modulated by the interactional context (see also Mitchell et al. 2025).</footnote>
Human adults and children are fairly competent in identifying different kinds of dog vocalizations, especially variation in barking (Pongrácz et al., 2006; Mitchell, 2023).<fnref n="6" /> Some of the vocalizations that are central in dogs' communication are also used by humans when interacting with dogs, e.g. for establishing a close connection within play (Mitchell, 2023). Mondémé (2018) has called occurrences where humans mimic animal sounds, e.g. growling, *morphisms*. Harjunpää (2022) describes as *recycling* the segments where humans respond to other animals' vocalization, e.g. barking, by imitating and reduplicating it, thus treating it as a conversational turn.

## 2.2. The semiotics and the routines of dog-human play

In a play framework, players use special signals to indicate that the ongoing activity is a play. The play actions can be simulations of equivalent non-play actions (Bateson, 1972; Mitchell, 1991). In semiotic terms, this means that “the form of interaction takes precedence over the substantive content” (Jerolmack, 2009). The form receives a new meaning in the play (Despret, 2021). For example, chasing and biting do not cause the same painful consequences to the playing partner as they would do to a prey in a hunting context. The player who uses play forms must be able to anticipate the playing partner's reaction to these. In this way, the new meaning is activated in social interaction and based on social reasoning. Studies on children's play with other humans have identified the following characteristics shared by all types of play: intrinsic motivation (the activity in itself counts), opposition to external control, flexibility, creativity, active engagement, as well as physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity (Melson, 2010).

Play signals are a category of meaningful constituents in the complex system of interspecific communication. In dog-human play, they cross species boundaries. One well known example of dog's bodily play signals recognized by humans is the play bow, where the dog leans forward, lowers the chest, and stretches the front legs (Bradshaw and Rooney, 2014). When it comes to vocalizations, playful barks and growls are shaped differently from those produced e.g. in agonistic contexts, and humans can identify these distinctions (Faragó et al., 2014, 2017).

Dogs have been observed to be more interactive (at least in a human sense) and less competitive when playing with humans than with other dogs (Bradshaw and Rooney, 2014). Horowitz and Hecht (2016) identified over 30 types of play in their corpus of recorded dog-human play activities. Mitchell and Thompson (1991), detecting the same activities, called these types of repeated action sequences *projects*.

There are relatively few studies concentrating on child-dog play, although this type of activity is known to be frequent in the lives of family dogs and human children living with them. For example, 5- to 13-year-old American children have been reported to play several times a week with other animals living in the same household. The frequency remained unchanged across the age span, whereas playing with siblings reduced with age (Melson, 2018).

# 3. Data and methods

## 3.1. Characteristics of the data

The data consist of 1-h video recordings presenting 4 dog-human dyads in ecological contexts. The human participants were French-speaking 8-11-year-old children. The dogs represented 3 different breeds, and they were adults.<fnref n="7" /> All families lived in a house with a garden; the dogs had access indoors and outdoors. None of the dogs presented behavioural issues. Table 1 summarizes background information retrieved through parental questionnaire and subsequently verified by the researcher (M. Grandgeorge). The children and the dogs are identified with pseudonyms.

<table><caption>**Table 1**

Characteristics of the participants.</caption><thead><tr><th>Dyad</th><th>Child</th><th>Sex</th><th>Age (yrs)</th><th>Dog</th><th>Breed</th><th>Sex</th><th>Living environment</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Dyad 1</td><td>Gabriel</td><td>M</td><td>11</td><td>Chouka</td><td>French spaniel</td><td>F</td><td>Rural</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 2</td><td>Timothé</td><td>M</td><td>9</td><td>Oscar</td><td>King Charles spaniel</td><td>M</td><td>Urban</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 3</td><td>Léo</td><td>M</td><td>8</td><td>Billy</td><td>Boxer</td><td>F</td><td>Rural</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 4</td><td>Louna</td><td>F</td><td>11</td><td>Bella</td><td>Boxer</td><td>F</td><td>Rural</td></tr></tbody></table>

Table 2 shows the distribution of time spent indoors and outdoors, playing and not playing, during the video. The number and the mean duration of identified play sequences are also indicated. Most dyads spent more time outdoors than indoors, except for dyad 3. The overall proportion of play was relatively similar, more than a third but less than half of time for all

<footnote n="6">⁶ On difficulties understanding canine bodily signals, however, see Demirbas et al. (2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ A dog is considered to be adult at the age of 2 years. We do not have more precise information on the filmed dogs' age.</footnote>
dyads. The dyads who spent most of their time outdoors did not play at all or very little indoors. There is important variation in the number and the mean duration of identified play sequences, due to the ecological situation of the video recording.

<table><caption>**Table 2**
Data according to the time spent indoors vs. outdoors, play vs. no-play.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Total number of sequences</th><th>Total indoors (%)</th><th>Total outdoors (%)</th><th>Overall play time (%)</th><th>Play indoors (%)</th><th>Play outdoors (%)</th><th>No-play indoors (%)</th><th>No-play outdoors (%)</th><th>Number of play sequences</th><th>Mean duration of a play sequence (sec)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Dyad 1</td><td>151</td><td>24.6</td><td>75.4</td><td>32.8</td><td>0.8</td><td>98.2</td><td>22.8</td><td>77.2</td><td>36</td><td>21.3 ± 20.4</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 2</td><td>59</td><td>39.0</td><td>61.0</td><td>33.2</td><td>0.0</td><td>100.0</td><td>-</td><td>-</td><td>3</td><td>96.3 ± 51.7</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 3</td><td>57</td><td>80.4</td><td>19.6</td><td>45.7</td><td>58.6</td><td>41.4</td><td>77.3</td><td>22.7</td><td>9</td><td>78.1 ± 111.3</td></tr><tr><td>Dyad 4</td><td>74</td><td>0.0</td><td>100.0</td><td>37.6</td><td>-</td><td>100.0</td><td>-</td><td>100.0</td><td>28</td><td>40.3 ± 66.9</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 3.2. Experimental design

Recording sessions were performed at fixed times, when the children were back from school (4–6 p.m.). Before starting to film, the researcher (M. Grandgeorge) asked the child and the other people present (e.g. parents and siblings) to behave as usual and made clear that no behaviour was considered either good or bad. She carried the camera and filmed the child’s behaviour continuously, including moments of interaction with the dog or with family members, as well as solitary activities. The audio recordings were made directly using the camera. The researcher was mostly positioned between 1 and 5 m from the child and, at most, up to 10 m in cases of very rapid movement outdoors. The researcher followed the child whenever they moved. The researcher remained silent and did not take part in the interactions (MacGrew, 1972; Millot et al., 1988). If several children lived in the family, one of them was selected and followed during recording, the others were considered as associate children. They were not observed for the present study.<fnref n="8" />

## 3.3. Ethics

Data were collected between 2009 and 2012, in accordance with the French legislation in force at that time. As this research was observational, it required no ethics committee then. All dogs involved in the study were family pets, hence under their owners’ responsibility during the recording. The study was conducted in accordance with the regulations governing the use of animals for research. Regarding humans, all parents provided free, informed written consent for the participation of their child in the study, all in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (6th revision), and French regulations in force at that time. These videos were part of a larger dataset used in previous research (Grandgeorge et al., 2020).

## 3.4. Methods

At the first stage of the analysis, ethological methods of data sampling were used for measuring interpersonal distance (Altmann, 1974). Each 1-h video recording was annotated as follows: (a) child and/or dog not visible, (b) child and dog visible in context of play and (c) child and dog visible in other context than play (hereafter, no-play). Play sequences were identified as actions with intrinsic motivation, active engagement of both participants, as well as physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity (see 2.2.). At this stage, we also coded the environment where the child-dog dyads were filmed (indoors/outdoors, see Table 2).

The second step involved instantaneous scan sampling, i.e., coding an individual’s ongoing activity at preselected moments of time (Altmann, 1974). In the current study, this was every 2 s. Such sampling is used to study the proportion of time spent in various activities. At the same time, we measured spatial distance between the child and the dog in terms of child’s arm length away from the dog: 0 (contact), more than 0 to less than 1/2 arm, 1/2 arm to 1 arm, more than 1 arm to 1 1/2 arms, more than 1 1/2 arms, not visible (see Dollion et al., 2022; Grandgeorge et al., 2014). Contact (i.e., distance 0) was coded as either direct contact (e.g. hand on dog’s fur) or indirect contact (e.g. using a brush to take care of dog’s fur). Category « more than 1 1/2 arm » was considered as distant. Instantaneous scan sampling yielded the frequency of time spent at a given interpersonal distance.

The third step entailed sampling all instances of a given behavioural pattern, namely coding occurrences where either of the members of a dyad adjusted the interpersonal distance (Altmann, 1974). Here, we only coded occurrences where both members of the dyad were visible. The coded adjustments of interpersonal distance were the following:

<footnote n="8">⁸ For more details, see Grandgeorge et al. (2020).</footnote>
<table><thead><tr><th>Attraction behaviours</th><th>Withdrawal behaviours</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><p><em>Approaching:</em> The individual child or dog took at least 2 steps in the direction of the other individual (±45°), with or without making eye contact. This should be done within a maximum distance of 3 times the size of the child at the starting point.</p><p><em>Turning towards:</em> The individual child or dog turned their head and/or body towards the other individual (±45° from facing each other). This behaviour should occur at a minimum distance of 1 m between the two individuals.</p></td><td><p><em>Moving away:</em> The individual child or dog took at least 2 steps in the opposite direction of the other individual (±45°). This must be done within a maximum distance of 3 times the child's height.</p><p><em>Turning away:</em> The individual child or dog turned their head and/or body away from the other individual (±45° from facing each other). This behaviour should occur at a minimum distance of 1 m between the two individuals.</p></td></tr></tbody></table>

Sampling all occurrences of adjustments of interpersonal distance provided the rate of occurrences and temporal changes according to context (play or no-play).

The coding of the above items in the video recordings was performed by the same raters. For reliability purposes, their training was conducted by a senior researcher (M. Grandgeorge), and the video recordings were coded until a very good inter-observer reliability coefficient was reached (95 % of common coding). The video recordings were then singly coded.

As the data were not normally distributed, we used descriptive analyses and non-parametric statistical tests (Siegel and Castellan, 1988). Because the duration of the child-dog visibility varied between video recordings, we homogenized all data by calculating percentage. Friedmann, Chi-square and Wilcoxon matched pair tests were used to compare data (e.g. between play and no-play). These analyses were run with Statistica software with an accepted p level at .05.

For the phonetic analysis, the Praat program (Boersma and Weenink, 2024) was employed to extract speech segments produced by the children during interactions with the dog. The process involved mapping the timeline generated from distance scanning to the corresponding speech production instances. This enabled the precise identification of when the child spoke during the interactions. We extracted various parameters from children's speech segments to analyze the speech patterns used at different interpersonal distances. The number of words per speech chunk<fnref n="9" /> and the duration of each speech chunk were calculated, providing insight into the length of time each child spent speaking and the number of words they used for addressing the dog. Additionally, the mean fundamental frequency (F0) was extracted, offering information about the pitch of the child's voice. To provide a standardized measure, the obtained F0 values in Hertz were transformed into semitones using 50Hz as the reference F0 value. Linear models were carried out in R (R Development Core TeamR, 2019) to analyze the number of words, the duration and the mean f0 of each speech chunk as a function of the distance between children and dogs. Because the amount of data with the necessary acoustic quality was insufficient for distinguishing play and no-play contexts in the phonetic analysis, the results of this part concern the overall child-dog interaction.

For observing sound patterns and interpersonal distance in the interactional context of play, the sequences coded as "play" were selected and the non-verbal mouth sounds of both participants were identified. In addition, children's verbal productions were analyzed according to the presence of selected linguistic elements (demonstrative and personal proforms, spatial expressions). The sequences selected for closer analysis were transcribed using the multimodal transcription conventions (Mondada, 2018). The screen shots presented in the paper were pseudonymized by using an image processing tool or by extracting the contours manually, depending on the quality of the image.

# 4. Results

## 4.1. Interpersonal distance

On all videos, children and dogs spent most of the time very close to each other (i.e., more than 0 to less than 1/2 arm) or in physical contact, and more rarely at distance of more than 1/2 arm. The physical contact was in most cases direct contact (in average, 86.5 %). When looking at all dyads together, no difference was observed between play and no-play contexts (Wilcoxon tests contact, p = 0.375; more than 0 to less than 1/2 arm, p = 0.125; 1/2 arm to 1 arm, p = .100; more than 1 arm to 1 1/2 arms, p = 0.625; more than 1 1/2 arms, p = 0.125), certainly due to a high interindividual variability, as shown in the individual results presented in Fig. 1.

<footnote n="9">⁹ Here, speech chunk refers to speech produced between pauses.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1.** Mean distance evaluated in child's arm length in relation to time (in per cent) between dog and child in the context of play vs. no-play.</figcaption></figure>
When comparing the four dyads, the difference between play and no-play is not manifested equally. In dyads 2 and 3, there was more proximity and physical contact in play context than in no-play. The indoors vs. outdoors setting did not play a role here, because dyad 2 spent 100 % of their playing time outdoors, whereas dyad 3 spent most of their playing time (58.6 %) indoors (see Table 2, above). The play projects of the dyads were however relatively similar, entailing intimate distance and touching (Example 3, below). In dyad 1, the distribution of interpersonal distance in terms of play vs. no-play was opposite. The dog and the child spent more time close to each other or in physical contact in no-play context, whereas they tended to be more at distance when playing. This is also likely to stem from the types of activities the dyad was engaged in. Their shared playing activity was a ball game where, all the while the child acted as if he was playing football, the dog was engaged in fetching and chasing (Example 1, below; see also Goode, 2007: 30–33, for a description of “doggie soccer”). This generated relatively long interpersonal distance. On the other hand, in indoors setting, the child spent time petting the dog. In dyad 4, no significant difference in interpersonal distance was observed between play and no-play. The dyad spent all their time outdoors, where their activities were slightly different from those of the three other dyads. The play projects included highly goal-oriented (Example 2, below) and trained activities, such as agility-type of obstacle jumping.

Proxemic adjustments were slightly more frequently performed by dogs (n = 458 occurrences; 54.6 %) than children (n = 381 occurrences; 45.4 %). Both children and dogs were mainly moving away or approaching rather than turning away and turning towards. When comparing withdrawal (i.e., move away and turn away) and attraction (i.e., approach and turn towards), children and dogs did not behave similarly (X² = 31.53, p < .001), as dogs displayed more withdrawal (57 %) than attraction behaviours (43 %) and children displayed more attraction (62.5 %) than withdrawal behaviours (37.5 %) (Fig. 2).

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Proportion of withdrawal to attraction displayed by dogs and children in play. Chi-square test, ***p < 0.001.</figcaption></figure>

Interestingly, withdrawal and attraction were similarly displayed by the dogs in play and no-play contexts (X² = 1.16, p = 0.28), whereas children showed attraction behaviours clearly more often in play contexts (68.7 %) than in no-play (57.3 %) (X² = 5.23, p = 0.022).

In summary, the proxemic analysis revealed that there is a clear tendency for a close distance and physical contact in the child-dog interactions. However, when it comes to comparing play and no-play, there is considerable variation between dyads. This is likely to stem from the diversity of play projects that the dyads are engaged in. The analysis exhibits a tendency for children to move towards dogs and for dogs to withdraw from children, and this is even stronger in a play context. Yet, withdrawal in play context does not necessarily signal weak engagement in the interaction, as the play project may entail adjustments in distance motivated by players' orientation to objects, such as a ball. Closeness and object orientation in play are further discussed in section 4.3.

## 4.2. Vocal variation and proxemics

In this section, we explore how parameters of speech production vary according to interpersonal distance. Specifically, we analyze three key aspects: the number of words produced in each speech chunk, the duration of each speech production, and the mean fundamental frequency (f0) of the production. By examining these parameters in relation to interpersonal distance,
we aim to elucidate how proximity is related to the mechanics and dynamics of spoken communication. This investigation sheds light on the intricate interplay between social context and speech production and supports the particular role of proximity in child-dog interaction, already observed in the previous section.

Children did not speak to dogs from the more than 1- to 1 1/2-arm distance at all (hence not visible in the figures). Additionally, physical contact is divided into ‘direct contact’ and ‘indirect contact’ in this section, to examine any potential differences in speech production based on these factors.

Figs. 3–5 present the results for each parameter in connection with the interpersonal distance between the dog and the speaking child.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. The number of words per speech chunk according to interpersonal distance.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. The duration of speech chunk (in seconds) according to interpersonal distance.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. The mean fundamental frequency (in ST) according to interpersonal distance.</figcaption></figure>
The number of words per speech chunk did not exhibit any consistent tendency. No significant results were found between the groups ($p > 0.05$ for all comparisons) (Fig. 3).

When observing speech duration and fundamental frequency, the analysis revealed some interesting patterns. Examination of the duration patterns indicated that when there was direct physical contact with the dog, the child tended to speak for longer durations (Fig. 4). Results from the linear model confirm that the duration of speech is significantly shorter for ‘1/2–1 arm’ ($\beta = -1.6943$; $t = -2.022$; SE = 0.8380), ‘>1 1/2 arm’ ($\beta = -2.7366$; $t = -2.777$; SE = 0.9855) and ‘not visible’ ($\beta = -2.2503$; $t = -3.419$; SE = 0.6583) than for ‘direct contact’. No significant differences are observed for ‘indirect contact’ and ‘< 1/2 arm’ compared to what is observed for ‘direct contact’. Closer proximity during interactions between children and dogs appears to elicit sound prolongation in children’s speech production.

Moreover, it was observed that when the children were in direct contact with the dogs, their speech exhibited a lower mean fundamental frequency ($f0$) (Fig. 5). Results from the linear model confirm that the mean $f0$ is significantly higher for ‘indirect contact’ ($\beta = 16.632$; $t = 2.936$; SE = 5.665), ‘<1/2 arm’ ($\beta = 10.568$; $t = 3.182$; SE = 3.322), ‘1/2–1 arm’ ($\beta = 10.560$; $t = 2.636$; SE = 4.006), ‘>1 1/2 arm’ ($\beta = 12.424$; $t = 2.621$; SE = 4.740) and ‘not visible’ ($\beta = 14.631$; $t = 4.755$; SE = 3.077) than for ‘direct contact’. This lower pitch may reflect a sense of comfort or familiarity when interacting with the dog, as lower $F0$ values are often associated with relaxed or intimate communication contexts.<fnref n="10" /> It is notable that the results for direct contact and indirect contact are significantly different, with indirect contact showing a much higher $f0$ compared to direct contact (again, $\beta = 16.632$; $t = 2.936$; SE = 5.665).

### 4.3. Sounds, closeness, and referentiality

The aim of this section is to elaborate on the quantified tendencies exposed in 4.1–4.2. We zoom into three specific play sequences to offer insight into the overall importance of physical closeness and contact in child-dog interaction and the variation in attraction and withdrawal behaviour. The selected sequences include object-mediated hidden and out-of-reach object play with mouth sounds.<fnref n="11" /> In children’s case, these were growling, tongue clicking, whispering, and humming. In dogs’ sounds, we were able to observe barking, growling, and panting. The children’s sounds all occurred at moments where the children were instigating the dog to search for a hidden object or the child themself who was hiding. The dog barks and growls occurred during a ball game as the ball moved in and out of the dog’s reach. The panting was present at different moments of play and no-play, but no special play panting could be identified in the acoustic conditions of the data (cf. Volsche et al., 2023).

We show that proxemic adjustments and mouth sounds are crucial elements for construing local referentiality in child-dog interaction. This can further be observed in the verbal language used by children, as well as their concrete efforts to share the perspective of the dog.

#### Extract 1: Barking and growling in a ball game: from distance-related sound variation to iconicity (dyad 1)

Chouka barks and growls regularly during her ball game with Gabriel. This is typical play behaviour for dogs, especially when playing with familiar humans (Mitchell, 2023). Chouka’s play behaviour, including its soundscape, also echoes the history of her breed as a hunting dog.

We counted 42 barks and 25 growls during the 1-h video. We observed that these vocalizations were not directly connected to interpersonal distance but to Chouka’s relative access to the ball. The barks always appeared in a context where the ball was out of Chouka’s reach and held by Gabriel, whereas most growls (22 out of 25) were observable in a situation where the ball became reachable to Chouka in different ways. In most cases, she was about to enter into direct contact with the ball, placing her mouth on the ball simultaneously with the growl or soon after it. However, the ball was not necessarily in Chouka’s mouth during the growls, so she could theoretically have barked, too. The moment of the growl and the moment of grabbing the ball were sometimes separated in time (see Example 1, below).

When Chouka barks, her body and gaze are oriented to the ball held by Gabriel in his hands or in direct contact with his feet. There is a minimum distance of 1 arm between Chouka and the ball/Gabriel. The growls occur regardless of Chouka’s distance to Gabriel as the ball may become reachable to Chouka after Gabriel has kicked it further from himself.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Recall that in this part of the analysis play and no-play contexts could not be distinguished. It is possible that play context involves high-pitched sounds even when the players are physically close.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ These were not measurable through phonetic analysis because of too poor acoustic quality and scarce number of occurrences.</footnote>
Chouka's barks and growls are of the so-called local referential type (e.g. Faragó et al., 2010; Worsley and O'Hara, 2018), in that they do not appear as purely affective, i.e., expressing exclusively Chouka's inner state, but signal the movement of the ball, which corresponds to a specific point in the repeated play project. Much like human utterances where prosodic and verbal clues indicate stance alongside the propositional content, Chouka's vocalizations are likely to convey simultaneously affective and referential type of information, as she simulates the movement and the sound of attacking.

The referential relationship between Chouka's vocalizations and the specific points in play is iconic. In no-play contexts, barks are long-distance calls (Faragó et al., 2017). In the play setting, while the interpersonal distance remains relatively short (i.e., not altering hearing possibilities), the long-distance call marks those moments where the ball is out of Chouka's reach. There is thus a relative distance between the ball and the player. The growl, which because of its acoustic properties can only be heard at a short distance, occurs when Chouka is close to the ball. The original function of the two vocalization types, pertaining to interpersonal distance that conditions hearing, is modified into marking certain points in the ongoing play project, in terms of vocalizer's relative access to the play object.

Example (1) shows that Gabriel displays his understanding of the meaning of Chouka's growls as part of their playing activity.

**Example 1.** Chouka & Gabriel. Non pas r(h)o::: r(h)a:::<fnref n="12" />

1 cho >>+rushes towards the ball+

2 CHO + wrouh: #wrouh::h+
+ lowers head +
#fig6

3 cho +%jumps to the left %+
gab %looks at cho----- %

4 cho +%jumps to the left%+
gab %LF over the ball--%

5 GAB + eh +
cho +rushes to the ball +

6 GAB % he #he %
+....... %turns to cho %
cho +puts open mouth on the ball-->
#fig7

7 GAB % non % pas % r(h)o::: %+
no not r(h)o:::
%RF kicks the ball% % RF kicks the ball%
cho -->+

8 GAB %+ r(h)a::: %
%LF kicks the ball%
cho +trots slowly-->>

<footnote n="12">¹² In the transcription, LF means left foot, RF stands for right foot. The symbols (e.g. +, #, %) are used for indicating the beginning and the completion of the embodied action and for temporalizing the action relative to simultaneous talk (for more details, see Mondada, 2018). The transcription method is adapted on lines 3–4 for indicating Chouka’s and Gabriel’s simultaneous actions during a sequence with no vocal interaction. Chouka’s jumping is used as an anchor for locating Gabriel’s gaze and left foot movement.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 7.</figcaption></figure>

At the beginning of this extract, Chouka lowers her head, leans forward and growls as she moves towards the ball (Fig. 6, line 2). There is a slight change in form within Chouka's vocalization, as the growl turns into a loud exhalation, dividing it into two parts (*wrouh: wrou::h*) [Audio1]. There are some movements, namely jumps, after the growl before she puts her mouth on the ball (Fig. 7, line 6). Gabriel shows his understanding that the growl is to be placed in the playful framework, as he laughs and goes on dribbling. When Chouka intervenes by placing her mouth on the ball, Gabriel not only imitates Chouka's two-part combination of growl and exhalation (*r(h)o::: r(h)a:::*) but also integrates the recycled form (*Harjunpää, 2022*) in a semantically complex grammatical construction, namely negation (*non pas* 'no not'). He treats Chouka's growl as a meaningful component of the playful interaction that carries a local referential meaning recognizable for both playing partners. The growl potentially announces Chouka taking possession of the ball and thus modifying the play project. By negating *r(h)o::: r(h)a:::*; Gabriel implies this meaning but cancels it. Gabriel thus gives a human-linguistic form to the referential potential of Chouka's growl. At the same time, Gabriel kicks the ball, so that Chouka loses it (lines 7–8). The event to which Chouka's growl is referentially connected to is in this way cancelled both linguistically and physically.

Extract 2: Pointing with tongue clicks and gaze in a hidden-object play: how to see what the dog sees? (dyad 4)

The analysis of Extract 1 showed that canine sounds related to interpersonal distance can be converted into a referential resource in child-dog interaction and shared across species. In this second example, we will see that when interacting with dogs in a play setting, the human children, too, can signal relative distance through mouth sounds, and that these sounds are also employed for construing referential relationships. Furthermore, the potential referentiaity of dog's bodily signals triggers proxemic adjustments from the child's side. The language forms used by the child carry traces of the ongoing indexical meaning construction.

Before the extract analyzed here, Louna has placed a small ball on a basketball stand, behind the backboard from Bella's perspective. After this, Louna has tried to instigate Bella to play with a football. Bella continues to return to the stand and to
look alternately towards Louna and up towards the basketball backboard, seemingly not accepting Louna's invitation to change the play project and, instead, seeking to orient Louna's attention to the hidden toy (cf. Cornips et al., 2023).

Louna now approaches the basketball stand again and raises her hand on the hoop. Bella is sitting, with her body and gaze oriented to the location of the ball. Panting less loudly and less visibly than before, she displays focussed attention to the hidden object. Louna produces two pairs of alveolar lateral tongue clicks from a rather long distance to Bella (apr. 1½ arm length). The first pair is of rise-fall type: the second click is produced with a lower intensity and a change in articulation. [Audio2] The outcome is a "click-clack" type of sound combination. The difference between the two parts is in synchrony with Louna's head movements and gaze. When she produces the higher sound ("click"), she looks up towards the backboard and her own hand on the hoop (Fig. 8). As she then produces the lower sound ("clack"), she turns her head downwards and to her left, so that she looks at Bella's direction (Fig. 9).

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 8. "Click 1.1."</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 9. "Clack 1.2."</figcaption></figure>
Louna then looks up at her right hand and down at Bella again in silence. After this, she produces a mirrored clicking pattern of a “clack-click” type. [Audio3] With her right arm still raised and her hand up on the hoop, she produces a lower sound (“clack”), looking at Bella (Fig. 10). Then turning her head upwards and to the right and raising her eyes towards the hoop, she produces a higher sound (“click”) (Fig. 11). During Louna’s two pairs of clicking sounds and alternating head and eye movements, Bella keeps looking at the backboard.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 10. “Clack 2.1”</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 11. “Click 2.2.”</figcaption></figure>
The two pairs of click sounds are in indexical relationship with Bella's and the ball's locations. The high-low variation of the tongue clicks iconically corresponds to the vertical distance separating the ball and the dog: the ball is high up, Bella is down on the ground. The hidden-object play takes the qualities of an object-keepaway project (see Mitchell, 2023: 488), as Louna's multimodal indexing of the distance between the dog and the ball simulates a movement between the two and thus the potential perceptual availability of the ball. By depicting her own embodied actions and perception through click sounds Louna shows her intercorporeal involvement in the play (Hofstetter and Keevallik, 2023; Szczepek Reed, 2024, on vocally depicting others' actions).

Louna now keeps her eyes on Bella and addresses her verbally: ↑allez ↑viens tu la vois même p(h)a:s 'Come on you don't even see it' (lines 1–2). This utterance ensues from Bella's continued gaze towards the toy. The grammatical construction of the utterance shows that Louna gives the ball a discourse-old referent status, as she refers to it with the person pronoun la 'it'. Bella's bodily orientation and gaze are treated by Louna as entailing an indexical reference to the ball. In Louna's utterance, the 2SG reference to Bella, as well as the negative markers (Verhagen, 2005), indicate that separates her own perspective from that of her interlocutor (1SG vs. 2SG, 'to see' vs. 'to not to see'). This position is about to change in what follows, as Louna gradually puts herself in Bella's position.

**Example 2.** Bella & Louna. *Tu la vois même p(h)a:s*

1 LOU % £↑al+lez ↑viens

come on

+looks at bel-->

bel %---looks at the backboard-->>

£---pants-->>

2 LOU tu #@ la vois même#+- p(h)a:s &

you don't even see it

#raises LF towards bel#& LF on the ground &

@leans forward turning towards backboard-->>

--> + - looks at the backboard-->>

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 12.</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 13.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 14.</figcaption></figure>
Louna takes a long step with her left foot, bends her body laterally to the left, approaching Bella in this way, and looks up towards the backboard with her right arm still raised (Fig. 12). Both players now look at the basketball stand from the same direction. After this, Louna turns to Bella, lowering her arm, and thus giving up her position as the indicator of Bella's and the ball's mutual distance. She steps on Bella's side of the baseball stand and gradually introduces herself in Bella's peripersonal space. At this point, we can observe a mutual gaze (Fig. 13). This could show that Bella has observed a change in the inter-actional space. Louna continues to bend her body lower, seeking to place her head right next to Bella's, and to literally share the same perspective. However, Bella bows her head, licking her lips, and avoiding physical contact (Fig. 14). After this, Louna goes to the stand and lets the ball drop. Bella catches the ball

Extract 3: *Whispering in a hidden-object play: merging perspectives* (dyad 3)

In the previous extract, the child used non-verbal sounds for establishing iconic and indexical reference. When treating the potential indexicality of canine bodily signals, she sought to reach the perceptual centre occupied by her dog companion. In this last example of sound patterns in context, we further explore the connection between referentiality and perspective-sharing in child-dog play.

At the beginning of this extract, Léo introduces with his right hand a small yellow plastic capsule on top of Billy's right front leg (Fig. 15). Raising his head and right ear, Billy looks at the toy (Fig. 16). He then touches the toy with his muzzle, as if to catch it, and after this raises his right front leg towards Léo's lifted right arm (Fig. 17). With these movements, Billy shows his engagement in the toy-mediated play. Then starts the hidden-object project. Léo puts his left hand on Billy's neck, preventing the dog from raising his head and seeing the other hand which is holding the toy. At the same time, Léo leans forward and places the ball behind Billy, under the table (Fig. 18). He then leans back again and looks at Billy who raises his head and looks towards Léo. Léo now points with his left hand in a quick, hasty manner (Fig. 19) and whispers *derrière* 'behind' (line 1). Billy raises his muzzle in synchrony with Leo's moving hand, and then lets it drop.

**Example 3.** Billy & Léo. *Derrière*

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 15.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 16.</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 17.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 18.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 19.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 20.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 21.</figcaption></figure>

The meaning of the linguistic element *derrière* 'behind' in Léo's utterance is based on an intrinsic frame of reference for locating the capsule (Levinson, 2003). Léo is not only using the dog's body as the landmark but he coordinates the space according to the frontal axis of Billy's body, which makes Billy's spatial location the origo of the spatial coordination. The hidden object is *derrière* 'behind' from the dog's perspective. However, the reference to Billy is implicit, as there is no linguistic element in the utterance referring to him. In cognitive linguistic terms, Billy is tacitly present in the meaning structure of Léo's utterance: he is the source of the perspective, therefore he cannot himself be conceived on the described scene (Langacker, 2008: 77). The linguistic construal of the situation is thus maximally intersubjective (Verhagen, 2005).
Léo points a second time with his left hand, again very quickly (Fig. 20). This time he whispers *derrière toi* 'behind you' (line 2). Billy raises his muzzle in synchrony with the child's pointing gesture, then lays his head on the carpet. From the grammatical construction, we can see that this time Léo's utterance includes an overt reference to the hearer, Billy, which makes the child the source of the perspective.

These two synchronized movements, pointing and muzzle raising, do not allow for the playing partners to move on with the play project. Because of the table, Billy cannot follow Léo's hand movement by turning his body further. After the two failed trials to instigate his playing partner to turn and look for the hidden toy, Léo changes hand. He now points with his right hand (Fig. 21), with the same swiftness as before, and whispers *derrière* 'behind' (line 3), returning with his utterance to an intersubjective construal of the situation where the source of the perspective is not overtly expressed.

At this stage, Léo's right hand is just above Billy's muzzle which is now pointing to the only direction where the dog can move without being hindered by the table. Léo touches Billy's right cheek with his right hand and then places his both hands on each side of Billy's neck. The child leans forward, as Billy starts to turn his head and slide towards the hidden toy (Fig. 22). Léo follows Billy's movement and dives under the table with him (Fig. 23).

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 22.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 23.</figcaption></figure>

We could observe that Léo's bodily, vocal, and verbal productions construe iconic meaning. They occur in a reduced form to imitate Léo's reduced involvement in the situation. Léo instigates Billy to search for the ball and find it "by himself". On a phonetic level, by whispering, he reduced the volume of his vocal delivery (Perlman and Cain, 2014). In gestures, he reduced the duration of the indexical sign of pointing (Ping and Goldin-Meadow, 2010).

From a cognitive linguistic perspective, we saw that he construed the situation from the dog's perspective and bodily position. The spatial coordination was performed in an intrinsic frame of reference. Accordingly, the frontal dimension of the dog's body served for landmark, not the child's own viewpoint. In addition, in two of the three utterances, the landmark was implicit which displayed tacit presence of the source of perspective and thus intersubjective construal of the situation.

Billy was sensitive to the location of Léo's pointing hand relative to his own bodily position. Léo gradually modified his pointing gesture and movement, to better adjust to the asymmetry in Billy's peripersonal space (Caldano and Coventry, 2019). Léo first used the left hand twice but switched then to the right hand, pointing closer to Billy's head. This side was the only side where Billy could turn backwards towards the hidden object. Billy indicated this through head movements, by raising his muzzle twice and then laying his head on the ground with muzzle pointing to the opposite direction.

Léo reduced his own embodied involvement, including in the linguistic construal, and thus highlighted Billy's perspective on the situation. At the end, Léo literally puts himself into Billy's position as the two glide together under the table.

**5. Discussion**

This paper investigated the proxemic properties of child-dog interaction, the interplay between interpersonal distance and the phonetic qualities of children's speech delivery, as well as the connections between interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and linguistic construal within play projects.

**Hypothesis 1** was partially confirmed.

1. Children display more behaviour entailing physical closeness and contact than dogs.
The proxemic analysis revealed an overall tendency for closeness and physical contact in the four dyads. However, it did not show any shared patterns concerning differences in interpersonal distance between play and no-play, as there was considerable variation between dyads. The result is likely to stem from the different play projects that the dyads were engaged in. This is in line with Mitchell's (2023) observations concerning the variation in humans' and dogs' vocal behaviour according to ongoing projects. The question was further dealt with in the qualitative analysis.

Children and dogs showed different patterns for adjusting interpersonal distance. The dogs tended to display more withdrawal, whereas the children were more liable to approach their interactional partner. This tendency in children was even stronger in the play context. This supports the findings of Walsh et al. (2024) showing that human adults and children tended to display more behaviours entailing physical contact and closeness in interanimal interaction than dogs. Whether the tendency detected by the present study is motivated by initiative-taking (cf. Millot et al., 1988) is addressed below when the results of the qualitative analysis are discussed.

**Hypothesis 2** was partially confirmed.

2. Children calibrate their vocal delivery according to the interpersonal distance with dogs.

The phonetic analysis revealed no significant difference in word number per speech production in terms of interpersonal distance. However, the children spoke with lower pitch, and their speech duration was longer when they were in physical contact or at close distance with the dogs. Hence, closeness was an important factor for children also in terms of vocal delivery. Interestingly, only direct contact generated lower pitch in our analysis, indirect contact showing considerably higher f0. This can be a vocal manifestation of the crucial importance of haptic dimension, namely petting and touching, in interspecies interaction (Mondémé, 2020).

**Hypothesis 3** was confirmed.

3. Proxemic adjustments, sounds, and human language structures form synchronized interactional patterns within which referentiality can emerge.

The final section zoomed into three specific play situations where children and dogs were at close distance involving contact and mouth sounds. The play projects included hidden or out-of-reach objects. The analysis showed that mouth sounds and proxemic adjustments are used for construing local referentiality by both parties. The human children further manifested this in their verbal language use and in their efforts to literally share the dogs' perspective.

In the first example, the dog's barks and growls varied according to the relative access of the dog to a ball. This is in line with Mitchell's (2023: 502) study on play between adult humans and dogs where "[barking] dogs appeared to be requesting that the human make the object available". In this way, the original function of the two vocalization types, pertaining to interpersonal distance that conditions hearing, was modified so as to refer to certain points in the intricate shaping of the play project.

The child recognized not only the interactional value but also the iconic referential potential of the dog's growls by incorporating a mimicked form of a growl in a negative clause. In doing so, the child cancelled, on a linguistic level, the event to which the growl was linked to. The child simultaneously negated the event in concrete physical terms, as he kicked the ball away from the dog. In Harjunpää's (2022) study, too, the recycled form of an animal vocalization was followed by a negative command, when a parrot was told not to babble. Incorporating the imitated animal vocalizations into negative utterances is a way to highlight their perceived interactional and referential potential and to include them in interspecies languaging.

In the two other examples, the children urged the dogs to "find" a hidden toy. In this type of play, the one who hides the object is supposed to intervene as little as possible in the process of finding. The vocal signals (whispering and tongue clicking) contributed to this minimal signalling.<fnref n="13" /> They iconically construed the reduced involvement of the child alongside indexical finger and gaze pointing. The dog players indicated through body movements and gaze their non-access to the toy and their engagement in the play project. At the final phases of the hidden-object play sequences, both children sought to take the dog's perspective in a most concrete way, as they approached the dog and tried to place themselves at the dog's position. The verbal forms that the children used showed that they perceived the boundary between their own perspective and that of the dog. In Léo's case, the possibility of crossing the boundary was also present in the linguistic form, as he construed his utterance without using any overt referential elements that would separate the dog's perspective from his own.

Children and dogs thus performed proxemic adjustments differently because play projects and the objects involved condition attraction and withdrawal differently. Our analyses suggest that children approach dogs, not only to initiate interaction (cf. Millot et al., 1988), but also to respond to the dogs' potentially referential signals within the play interaction. The children construe linguistically the referentiality identified in the dogs' behaviour and, in this vein, sometimes literally adopt the canine perspective in the situation. This entails a high degree of proximity, which can provoke the dog's withdrawal, as was the case in our Example 2. The dog's withdrawal could be a sign that she disprefers such a short interpersonal distance.

Play projects are in continuous elaboration and subject to negotiation. The observed children operated on different semiotic levels (iconic, indexical, symbolic) simultaneously and treated the dogs' vocal and bodily productions as meaningful

<footnote n="13">¹³ Cf. Goode (2007: 49) where whispering was used for orienting the dog to gestures.</footnote>
turns, with interactional functions and referential potential. This showed their experience of a special interspecies lan-
guaging. The fact that children identify referential potential in dogs' vocal and bodily behaviour and literally seek to share the
dogs' perspective accounts for the well documented fact that interaction with companion animals facilitates the development
of empathy, i.e., the ability to recognize, understand, and share the feelings of others (Melson, 2003).

One of the objectives of this paper was to open up perspectives on what could be the role of observational micro-level
studies after the so-called “quantitative turn” (cf. Sönning and Werner, 2021: 1179–1180; Kortmann, 2021: 1221). We
established a methodological architecture where quantitative methods were first used for detecting tendencies based on
those parameters that could be measured in the data at hand. However, as we had chosen to use data that were collected in an
ecological setting, instead of experimental conditions, the inadequate material quality of some of the data, as well as the
variety of communicative patterns adopted by the children and the dogs, which was reflected in the few occurrences for many
items, left a significant part of the data outside of the statistical scope. These data were included in the microlevel analysis.
Furthermore, the detailed observations concerning the embodied behaviour, including linguistic construal, offered per-
spectives on what lurks behind the quantified tendencies and showed thus the added value of qualitative analysis in human-
animal studies. Zooming into specific interactional situations can help us understand the local interplay between variables as
it unfolds in the messy conditions of what Grieve (2021: 1354) calls “the real world”. This is also the only way to get a glimpse
of what could be meaning construction in interactions between humans and other animals.

**6. Conclusion**

This paper showed that physical contact and proximity characterize child-dog interaction, and that reducing interpersonal
distance is more likely to be initiated by children. Physical closeness affects also the children's vocal behaviour. It suggested
that proxemic adjustments and mouth sounds are used to construe local referentiality, that children recognize referential
potential in dogs' sound productions and bodily clues and that to support the referential construal children attempt to literally
share the dog's perspective in the situation. This may evidence of the mechanism behind the well-known beneficial effects of
interaction with companion animals to the development of empathy. The paper furthermore made manifest that human
linguistic construal is part of the interspecies linguaging where different semiotic strings interlace. A pluridisciplinary
framework was established to pay due regard to the complexity of child-dog interactions and to include observations on
ecological data that were not adequate for statistical analysis. The study prepares the ground for future research in inter-
species linguaging, that has long been held back by the strong historical-cultural barrier separating human linguistic con-
strual from other modes of meaning construction.

**Declaration of competing interest**

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest concerning the paper "Interpersonal distance, mouth sounds, and referentiality in child-dog play: A pluridisciplinary approach".

**Credit authorship contribution statement**

Rea Peltola performed the qualitative analysis of linguistic data and play interaction. She conceived and designed the
overall structure of the paper. Yaru Wu performed the phonetic analysis. Marine Grandgeorge collected the data and per-
formed the statistical proxemic analysis. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

**Funding**

This work was supported by the Adrienne and Pierre Sommer Foundation, University of Caen Normandy, CNRS and University of Rennes 1.

**Acknowledgements**

We are thankful to the children, the dogs, and the families for their participation, the Adrienne and Pierre Sommer
Foundation for their support, and Margot de la Broise, Maxime Laurent, Gabrielle Lecrosnier, Ismael Letenneur, and Stanislas
Moravac for their contribution in coding and transcribing the data.

**Appendix A. Supplementary data**

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2025.04.006.

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