page_title: Dog communication
section_title: Dog–human communication
hierarchical_section_title: Dog communication / Dog–human communication
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: À partir d'Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1970, tiré originellement de Lorenz, 1952.粵語: 狼嘅各種表情；X 軸代表攻擊性，Y 軸代表恐懼，最右上角嗰個表情就係狼又驚又打算攻擊（例如俾敵人趕咗入死角）嗰時嘅表情。參考 Lorenz, 1952。
context_page_description: Dog communication is the transfer of information between dogs, as well as between dogs and humans. Behaviors associated with dog communication are categorized into visual and vocal. Visual communication includes mouth shape and head position, licking and sniffing, ear and tail positioning, eye gaze, facial expression, and body posture. Dog vocalizations, or auditory communication, can include barks, growls, howls, whines and whimpers, screams, pants and sighs. Dogs also communicate via gustatory communication, utilizing scent and pheromones.
  Humans can communicate with dogs through a wide variety of methods. Broadly, this includes vocalization, hand signals, body posture and touch. The two species also communicate visually: through domestication, dogs have become particularly adept at "reading" human facial expressions, and they are able to determine human emotional status. When communicating with a human their level of comprehension is generally comparable to a toddler. Humans can artificially alter how dogs communicate with other dogs and with humans by surgically cropping their ears and docking their tails.
context_section_description: Both humans and dogs are characterized by complex social lives with rich communication systems, but it is also possible that dogs, perhaps because of their reliance on humans for food, have evolved specialized skills for recognizing and interpreting human social-communicative signals. Four basic hypotheses have been put forward to account for the findings.
  Dogs, by way of their interactions with humans, learn to be responsive to human social cues through basic conditioning processes.
  By undergoing domestication, dogs not only reduced their fear of humans but also applied all-purpose problem-solving skills to their interactions with people. This largely innate gift for reading human social gestures was inadvertently selected for via domestication.
  Dogs' co-evolution with humans equipped them with the cognitive machinery to not only respond to human social cues but to understand human mental states; a so-called theory of mind.
  Dogs are adaptively predisposed to learn about human communicative gestures. In essence they come with a built-in "head start" to learn the significance of people's gestures, in much the same way that white-crowned sparrows acquire their species-typical song and ducklings imprint on their own kind.
  Dogs tend to be highly responsive to human cues, especially the direction of a gaze and the direction in which a human points. Dogs rely on the gestures of humans more than verbal cues, most importantly eye contact. Eye contact is considered an ostensive cue, which dogs are very smart at understanding. "Ostensive cues are a characteristic element of human communicative interactions that express the sender’s intention to initiate a communicative interaction." A human-dog gaze is one that strengthens the relationship between the two and it can create an ever stronger bond. It can help dogs establish stronger relationships by being able to communicate better with humans, as well as other dogs. Dogs will start to act and react much like their owners do, as they begin to sync their behaviors to those of their owners. Dogs will pick up on how their owners respond towards strangers and nonfriendly dogs.
  The pointing gesture is a human-specific signal, is referential in its nature, and is a foundational building block of human communication. Human infants acquire it weeks before the first spoken word. In 2009, a study compared the responses to a range of pointing gestures by dogs and human infants. The study showed little difference in the performance of 2-year-old children and dogs, while 3-year-old childrens' performances were higher. The results also showed that all subjects were able to generalize from their previous experience to respond to relatively novel pointing gestures. This can be explained as a joint outcome of their evolutionary history as well as their socialization in a human environment.
  One study has indicated that dogs are able to tell how big another dog is just by listening to its growl. The research also shows that dogs do not, or can not, misrepresent their size, and this is the first time research has shown animals can determine another's size by the sound it makes. The test, using images of many kinds of dogs, showed a small and big dog and played a growl. Twenty of the 24 test dogs looked at the image of the appropriately sized dog first and looked at it longest.
  Depending on the context, a dog's bark can vary in timing, pitch, and amplitude. It is possible that these have different meanings.
  Additionally, most people can tell from a bark whether a dog was alone or being approached by a stranger, playing or being aggressive, and able to tell from a growl how big the dog is. This is thought to be evidence of human-dog coevolution.
caption: A drawing by Konrad Lorenz showing facial expressions of a dog – a communication behavior
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