Christina Hunger
Christina Hunger
WHEN Stella, a chocolate brown dog, began moving around the house, Christina Hunger realised her dog was unusual. The 8-week-old puppy acted like the children that Hunger, a speech-language pathologist, worked with. “She was communicating how toddlers communicate right before they start saying words,” she writes in
How Stella Learned to Talk, her book about her experiences with the dog.
Hunger asked a simple …
Alexis Devine said that she knew early on that Bunny, her sheepadoodle puppy, was destined to talk. A 40-year-old artist and jewelry designer in Tacoma, Washington, Devine had pored over literature on canine cognition, communication and training in the months leading up to Bunny’s arrival. Through her research, she came across the Instagram page of a speech pathologist named Christina Hunger, who was documenting how her own dog, Stella, was beginning to develop an English vocabulary. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times Stella had a soundboard made up of circular buttons, each of which dictated a word when pressed. By pawing the buttons, which together formed loosely structured sentences, Stella was supposedly communicating in English. Hunger, 27, had been working for several years with assistive technology — in particular, alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) devices — to help nonverbal children acquire vocabulary and communicate
Bunny, an internet-famous sheepadoodle, has brought attention to a new area of study within animal cognition: the use of assistive technology for language acquisition.