How Stella learned to talk The groundbreaking story of the world's first talking dog

Hunger, a speech-language pathologist, routinely used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices with her young clients. Her ability to think beyond traditional (and sometimes, wrong-headed) approaches produced successes where other pathologists had abandoned hope. Rather than limit a child's options to communicate, she expanded them, and realized that her methods for helping speech-inhibited children learn to communicate might also help her dog, Stella, learn to communicate her needs. Hunger bought three recordable voice buttons and made her own version of an AAC for Stella. After weeks of practice and reinforcement, Stella began making the associations and used the buttons correctly. A cross-country move into a very small apartment set Stella's progress back temporarily. In time, Hunger attached the buttons to a board and added more words. Astounded at Stella's capabilities, Hunger employed both intuition and scientific observation and continued adding buttons, noting which expanded Stella's "vocabulary," and removed those that didn't. This fascinating study of the untapped potential in human-dog interaction includes end-of-chapter bullet-points for dog owners who are game to try on their own.