Christina Hunger, a US speech therapist, has successfully trained her pet to “talk”. The 26-year-old specialist wanted to try out the methods and techniques she uses in her practice with her pet Stella.
Christina assembled a device at home with a set of buttons attached to the board. If you press one or another button, a certain word is played from the speakers.
pics by Christina Hunger
Christina started training her dog when she was only 8 weeks old. 1.5 years of training on a daily basis brought results: Stella learned 29 words, and also began to make phrases from them, some up to five lexemes!
The teaching method was simple: Christina pressed a button and then performed a specific action.
Gradually, the animal remembered which combination of sounds corresponded to a particular action, and soon managed to combine several words depending on what it wanted to “say”.
According to Christina Hanger, now Stella says something to the owner every day, and the level of complexity of the phrases used by the dog is close to the level of language proficiency in 2-year-old children.
It’s an amazing discovery! What if we can teach all the dogs to speak? They will surely help us to understand their needs.!
