Say a familiar word to your dog and, sooner or later, the head tilts to one side. People have offered explanations for years, but for a long time they were mostly guesses. A 2021 study finally put the question to a test.
The old explanations
Several ideas have circulated among owners and veterinarians:
- Hearing better. Moving the head may help a dog work out where a sound is coming from.
- Seeing around the muzzle. A long snout can block part of the view of your face, and tilting may help a dog see your mouth and expression.
- Showing engagement. Some vets suggest the tilt is a social signal, similar to the way we nod to show we are listening.
All of these sound plausible. The trouble is that none of them had been properly tested.
What the 2021 study found
The first real investigation came from researchers at the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, led by Andrea Sommese. The work was published in the journal Animal Cognition in 2021. The team was actually studying so-called “gifted word learner” dogs, a rare group of border collies that can learn the names of many toys, when they noticed something odd: these dogs often tilted their heads right before fetching the correct toy.
So the researchers compared seven gifted border collies with 33 typical dogs. When the owner named a toy, the gifted dogs tilted their heads in about 43 percent of trials. The typical dogs did it in about 2 percent.
Is it about processing, not hearing?
The researchers also noted that the direction of the tilt did not change depending on where the owner was standing. If the tilt were mainly a way to locate a sound, you would expect it to shift with the source. Instead, the pattern suggests the tilt shows up when a dog hears something meaningful and is trying to make sense of it, such as matching a familiar word with a remembered object. Sommese has compared it to the way people sometimes tilt their heads while recalling a memory.
What we still don’t know
This is promising, but it is not the final word. The study was small, and the gifted dogs were all border collies, a breed known for exceptional learning ability. It is not yet clear whether ordinary dogs tilt their heads for the same reason when they hear words they know, or how much of the behavior comes from other factors such as curiosity, sounds in the environment or simply having learned that the gesture gets a reaction from people. The researchers themselves say more work is needed, including looking at other breeds and other triggers.
When a head tilt is a health problem
There is one important caveat. An occasional tilt in response to your voice is normal. A tilt that is constant, appears suddenly or comes with loss of balance, disorientation or circling can point to a medical problem, including ear or balance issues. In that case, call your vet.
For most dogs, though, the head tilt looks like what it seems to be: a dog paying attention to the human who is talking.