It also reveals the techniques Christina used to teach Stella, broken down into simple stages and actionable steps any dog owner can use to start communicating with their pets. It chronicles the journey Christina and Stella have taken together from the day they met to the day Stella spoke her first. It chronicles the journey Christina and Stella have taken together, from the day they met, to the day Stella “spoke” her first word, and the other breakthroughs they’ve had since. How Stella Learned to Talk is part memoir and part how-to guide. How Stella Learned to Talk is part memoir and part how-to guide. A few years later, Stella now has a bank of more than thirty word buttons, and uses them daily either individually or together to create near-complete sentences. How Stella Learned to Talk is part memoir and part how-to guide. At night, she wondered: If dogs can understand words we say to them, shouldn’t they be able to say words to us? Can dogs use AAC to communicate with humans?Ĭhristina decided to put her theory to the test with Stella and started using a paw-sized button programmed with her voice to say the word “outside” when clicked, whenever she took Stella out of the house. How Stella Learned to Talk is part memoir and part how-to guide. Hunger would indicate and name the object/action and push the button to say the word. She started with just a few recordable buttons that Stella could push to say, outside, play, and water.

During the day, she worked with toddlers with significant delays in language development and used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices to help them communicate. Hunger began teaching Stella after noticing the gestures and vocalizations Stella was already using to express herself. When speech-language pathologist Christina Hunger first came home with her puppy, Stella, it didn’t take long for her to start drawing connections between her job and her new pet.

How stella learned to talk