What’s that dog growling about?

LOS ANGELES — When it comes to interpreting dog growls, some humans are surprisingly good at taking the hint, a new study shows. Scientists testing how people categorized different types of natural growls found that people could largely tell playful vocalizations from threatening ones — though women and dog owners seemed to do better than their peers.

The findings, described in Royal Society Open Science, shed light on the relationship between dogs and humans — as well as on underlying vocal behaviors that might be shared across mammalian species.

Plenty of research in recent years has delved into dogs’ ability to understand humans. But relatively little seems to have focused on whether humans are any good at understanding dogs — even though communication is a two-way street, especially in two species that have developed in such close proximity.

“We know relatively little about the vocal communication system of dogs, and the most studied vocalization are the different barks,” lead author Tamas Farago, an ethologist at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, said in an email. As dogs were domesticated by humans, barks likely changed significantly and became the main way dogs communicate. Growls, however, may not have changed as much since the point that dogs diverged from wolves.

Farago and his colleagues tested humans using natural dog growls gathered in three scenarios: while playing tug of war with their owner, while guarding their food from another dog and while they felt threatened by a stranger.

The scientists found that overall, humans were pretty good at differentiating the growl types, classifying them correctly about 63 percent of the time (well above the chance level of 33 percent). They correctly identified 81 percent of the play growls, but were less accurate when it came to food-guarding (60 percent) and threatening (50 percent) growls.

Dog owners were much better than other humans at correctly identifying a growl’s meaning — which was surprising because previous research didn’t find such a strong advantage when people rated dog barks.