American speech therapist Christina Hunger not only helps people with speech impairments, but also taught her dog to speak. The 26-year-old has decided to transfer the experience she uses with 1-2-year-olds to her pet Stella, People reports. To do this, Christina assembled a device at home with several buttons fixed on the board, each of which, when pressed, plays a sound file with a word.
Having started to train her dog at the age of 8 weeks, over a year and a half of daily training, the owner taught the dog to “speak” 29 different words at once, and moreover, the animal learned to make up phrases of up to 5 words from them. The teaching method was simple - before each action, which can be expressed in one or more words on the board, Christina pressed the appropriate buttons. Over time, the dog remembered not only the meaning of each of them, but also learned to combine words corresponding to what Stella wants to say at the moment.
“I am surprised because every day my dog is telling me something new that it hasn’t said before. By the level of complexity of phrases and their construction, Stella already now resembles a 2-year-old child. I plan to continue my studies further by adding words to the board - with my invention I want to make the connection between owners and their pets even deeper,”the speech therapist emphasized. Currently, the "vocabulary" of a dog includes words that express a specific action (eat, play, walk) or an object (ball, beach), and "emotions" (joyful, sad), as well as the names of the owner and her boyfriend …
Author: Maxim Vershinin