Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. If you're a dog owner, like both of us are, you may have wished that you could communicate better with your

dog. Chances are you talk to your dog, but it would be great to have your dog talk back.

Stay tuned as we get some tips on how to make that happen.

Our guest on this episode is speech language pathologist Christina Hunger, who's known for her

groundbreaking work and being the first person to teach a dog to talk

using a customized communication device and speech therapy techniques.

She's the author of the new book, How Stella Learned to Talk,

the groundbreaking story of the world's first talking dog.

Christina, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me. Tell us who Stella is and how

she learned to talk. Stella is my three-year-old Australian cattle dog mixed with a catahula. She's wonderful.

She's sweet and spunky. And she learned to talk by me creating a communication device for her and teaching her how to say words just like I teach kids how to talk in speech therapy.

Talk to us about what your job entails as a speech pathologist. I know it's something that most of us are familiar with, but until I read more about you and your work, I wasn't sure quite how we got it to work for a dog.

Yeah, speech therapy is a very large scope of practice.

And what I've always done is I worked in the pediatric setting, which is working with kids.

A lot of kids who have some pretty significant disabilities,

and a lot of them aren't able to talk with verbal speech.

And when that happens, it's my job to find a different way to allow them to talk and express

language just through another way besides verbal speech.

So I've worked with a lot of kids who use communication devices to talk and teach them how to communicate that way. And so what I was

seeing with Stella was she was understanding the words that we were saying to her. And she was

demonstrating so many of the same skills

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