Quantifying the Power of Speech Therapy Dogs: Three Challenges to Research in Animal-Assisted Intervention
“What’s your evidence?”
It’s a question I ask my older clients often as we work through comprehending social communication contexts or more complex reading passages.
But it’s also a question lobbed at animal-assisted intervention in general, and, more specifically, animal-assisted speech therapy.
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the foundation of our field. Yet it gets tricky when it comes to quantifying the effects a speech therapy dog has on our clients.
Here’s three challenges I think researchers will face as studies on animal-assisted interventions become more common:
Therapy dog Delta provides deep pressure as part of a sensory-regulation routine this client often requests during animal-assisted speech therapy.
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#1 A speech therapy dog is not the treatment
The treatment is identifying a specific skill to target, shaping the development of that skill by eliciting opportunities and providing well-timed prompts, and promoting carryover across different contexts.
These are the basic principles underlying any communication or feeding goal a speech therapist might target.
The role of a speech therapy dog is to facilitate a client’s learning readiness and motivation.
I’ve repeatedly seen the tremendously calming effect a therapy dog can have when a client is able to pet the dog, receive deep pressure input from the dog sitting or lying on them, or even just watch the dog relaxing nearby.
In some cases this occurs naturally as a child spontaneously seeks out interactions with my speech therapy dog. At other times I am directing the child through a sensory-regulation routine and incorporating my dog as a neutral third party to avoid opposition and power struggles (e.g., “Let’s show Delta how we can take some calm breaths”; “See how Sky relaxes when we use long, slow pets down her back?”).
Some clients actually need to be more stimulated when tired or difficult to engage, and a speech therapy dog can provide regulating input here as well.
Starting a session with a quick-paced game of fetch, taking turns racing through a tunnel, or asking the therapy dog to perform silly tricks to earn a sensory-friendly treat can charge a session with excitement and facilitate better engagement in the learning process. (To see why I chose the products I use, see the descriptions under Animal-Assisted Speech Therapy Materials.)
In some cases, a client may be more willing to practice an emerging skill by speaking to the therapy dog as opposed to performing for just myself or their caregiver.
I often incorporate a “turn and tell” technique for certain skills that need high levels of repetition, asking the child to practice a certain number of times away from my therapy dog and then turning to say it again to the dog for extra repetitions, possibly with reduced prompting or after a delay to increase the challenge.
By incorporating a novel or silly component to an activity, a speech therapy dog may also assist in working memory. Children with learning differences may struggle to retain information learned just through listening and/or watching, but adding positive emotion and/or movement by interacting with a therapy dog may help.
Because a speech therapy dog primarily influences a communication goal indirectly, defining their impact on specific speech, language, and feeding skills will be difficult.
For details on how human-animal interactions have been studied and the measured effects on physical and psychosocial well-being, The Handbook of Animal-Assisted Therapy and Dogs in Schools are two excellent resources.
#2 Each therapy dog-client relationship is unique
There are certainly other ways a speech therapist can help a client regulate their sensory system and motivate, but inclusion of a speech therapy dog can be particularly effective with certain clients. Some people are simply more drawn to and therefore motivated to interact with animals than others.
I’ve partnered with four speech therapy dogs now and each one brings their own mix of personality and skills to work.
Some are slower-moving and more patient, others are quicker and goofier. Each of my dogs knows some basic obedience skill I can build into a session, but each also has specific skills they enjoy performing as well. Examples include:
· nosing aside objects to find hidden treats
· sitting on furniture
· standing on foam stepping stones as directed
· waving good-bye
My clients respond to these differences, sometimes with a marked preference for interacting with one dog over another. Delta is more empathic and seems to sense when an anxious child needs a calming head on their lap. Sky is goofier and better at drawing out kids who are feeling cranky or tired.
My speech therapy dogs also vary in how much they wish to engage in therapy from session to session and day to day. As sentient beings with their own species-specific behaviors, animal-assisted interventionists are tasked with balancing their therapy dog’s needs with those of their clients to keep everyone safe and respected.
Since larger study sample sizes and longer time frames often provide stronger evidence, it will be difficult to control for the individual factors each therapy dog brings to the intervention.
Therapy dog Sky gets mutually-enjoyable and calming belly rubs on one of her first animal-assisted speech therapy days. This boy was especially bonded to therapy dog Delta, so I worried he would be upset upon meeting Sky. But as you can see it worked out well!
#3 Novelty can impact a speech therapy dog’s effectiveness for better or worse
Having included animal-assisted speech therapy for five years now, I’ve mostly observed that my child clients do better after repeated interactions with my therapy dogs. My more anxious kids seem to appreciate the predictability of a brief greeting routine or knowing the dog will consistently sit with them to provide sensory input when needed.
However, I have had a couple clients in which the novelty of a speech therapy dog’s presence seemed to have a greater effect.
One of my older kids with autism and minimal spoken language, for example, verbally greeted Delta and asked for a hug on one of her first visits, both “firsts” according to her very excited parents. Though she still smiles and pets Delta, her parents and I haven’t noticed additional spontaneous speech directed to the dogs since.
It would be interesting and important for researchers to find what client characteristics would warrant more or less frequent inclusion of animal-assisted intervention to facilitate communication gains.
I am not a researcher. My brain doesn’t light up when I think about defining and quantifying specific behaviors. I have no interest in organizing presentations to ethics committees or writing grant proposals. But I do want to know how to provide the most effective and efficient speech and language therapy to the families on my caseload.
So I’m glad there are research minded Speech-Language Pathologists out there who are interested in discovering the actual impact of animal-assisted speech therapy.
I wish you all luck as it is a complex but important topic in need of more scientific evidence!
For an actual researcher’s thoughts on this topic, check out Animal-Assisted Intervention in Speech-Language Pathology: Practical, Clinical, and Theoretical Considerations by S. Antonucci.
For more ideas of how to partner with a speech therapy dog, follow on Instagram @Speech_Dogs and get your copy of Paws for Progress: Integrating Animal-Assisted Interventions Into Your Speech-Language Pathology Practice, coming fall ‘24 from ASHA Press.
May your days be filled with puppy wiggles and children’s giggles,
Sharlet
