SLP uses AAC to help dog communicate

An American pediatric SLP named Christina Hunger has done just this. Hunger taught her dog Stella how to communicate more effectively using language facilitation strategies and AAC buttons with pre-recorded words such as “park” and “walk”. Hunger is now sharing her work in this area with the world via her popular blog and her YouTube channel. She has a New York Times bestselling book “How Stella Learned to Talk” on the subject.

I first came across Hunger and her dog Stella while watching a newsclip on CNN. Hunger told the reporters that her dog is able to use buttons to communicate over 48 words. Stella can combine up to 5 words together to create unique phrases, ask and answer questions, express her thoughts and feelings, make observations, and participate in short conversations. Hunger highlighted that the types of words Stella learned are diverse and range from verbs (e.g. eat) and nouns (e.g. park) to emotions (e.g. happy). According to Hunger, she used common communication strategies and her Hanen training to facilitate language development in her dog.  Her work has started a YouTube trend. You can see many dogs now using AAC to communicate. Some cat lovers are even using the same tools to train their cats.

I work with adults in the area of dysphagia. Other than my UofT placements, I have never worked with children. I have been teaching my 5 year-old dog Sophie to communicate using  methods I remember from my UofT days, such as modeling with her AAC buttons, waiting for Sophie to respond, using cues such as “What do you want, Sophie?”, teaching her words in context, paying close attention to what she is trying to communicate and keeping it fun for her. We have had mixed results over the past few months. Sophie consistently presses the buttons to let me know she wants dinner or a walk, but in general ignores the rest of the buttons. These other words appear less motivating to her at this time. It is startling when I come home from work to see Sophie immediately run to her dinner button and slam it with her paw. When I am working from home, my workflow is often interrupted when I suddenly hear “walk” “walk” and find Sophie enthusiastically pressing her button and looking at me expectantly. I follow up by hitting her “later” button, which appears to disappoint her. I plan to add more buttons to her roster. Despite her limited expressive language, using these strategies has seemed to increase her receptive language abilities, and she pays closer attention when I speak to her. It has also strengthened our bond. I’m more attuned to Sophie’s needs and wants.

Hunger’s work is not without controversy. Some in the field of SLP believe she is stepping outside of the profession’s scope. Others believe SLPs have a lot to contribute to the field of animal communication.

I asked UofT’s own, Jennifer Wadds, for her opinion on this topic. Jennifer Wadds is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Clinical Education at the Department of SLP. She also is a SLP/Clinical Director of the private practice, Chatterbox Kids.

Panes - Do you have any pets? If yes, have you ever tried to use child language strategies to help them communicate? Were these strategies successful?

Wadds - Yes, since I have been a trained SLP I have lots of pets including 2 dogs, 2 cats, goldfish, and in the past some rabbits. I tend to use language facilitation strategies with all of them automatically but honestly the dogs are the most responsive. In particular, using short sentences or single words linked with a visual cue was effective for the dogs to learn to recognize a lot of words. I have not tried to train expressive communication but have noticed my dog does use some communication effectively such as sitting in front of his food bowl and looking between me and the bowl (joint attention?) to indicate he is ready for dinner. His learning is also imperfect, and I have unintentionally trained some language learning that I’d like to undo. For example,  he also will immediately bark and run to the front door if anyone says hello. This has been problematic in the pandemic with so many people saying hello on Zoom!

Panes - Do you know of any SLP/ animal psychology research collaborations?

Wadds - I believe there are a number of SLP collaborations looking at teaching primates to communicate. I would love to be involved in something like this!