Project Summary/Abstract
The proposed research evaluates an animal-assisted treatment (AAT) program for adults with aphasia, an
acquired language impairment most commonly resulting from stroke that affects more than 2 million
Americans. The hallmark impairment for persons with aphasia is word retrieval difficulty, which is sometimes
so severe that individuals are able only to produce one or two words. Although by definition a difficulty with
words, some of the consequences of aphasia most disruptive to well-being are not the word-finding problems
themselves, but the social isolation from which the loss of words can result. This is particularly impactful when
considered in light of the fact that individuals with aphasia retain the drive to communicate and the pragmatic
communication skills such as use of ‘body language’, facial expression, and tone of voice to do so. It is these
strengths of persons with aphasia that make them ideal candidates for work with animals, who attend as much
if not more to how we communicate than to what we say. The treatment evaluated in the current proposal, the
Persons with Aphasia Training Dogs (PATD) Program, is designed to target the psychosocial
consequences of aphasia, including loss of self-confidence and social isolation, through harnessing the
strengths of persons with aphasia and the benefits of human-animal interaction. Our specific aims are to 1)
determine whether people with aphasia, through participation in the PATD program, can learn and
implement positive reinforcement techniques to train dogs in basic obedience skills, and 2) assess
feasibility metrics including program acceptability/satisfaction. We will accomplish these aims by
enrolling people with aphasia in weekly treatment sessions during which they will team with a speech-language
pathologist and a family- or shelter-dwelling dog to receive training in positive-reinforcement dog training
techniques. We will assess program acceptability with our primary outcome measure, the Assessment of
Living with Aphasia (Kagan et al., 2010), complemented by self-report of participants’ PATD experience. Our
hypotheses are that people with aphasia will successfully implement positive reinforcement techniques for dog
training and that participation in the PATD program will result in increases in confidence and social
engagement for the participants. The expected outcomes of aims 1 and 2 will demonstrate the feasibility of
administering, and quantifying the effects of, canine-assisted aphasia treatment. To our knowledge, there is no
other program of this kind for persons with aphasia and this is the first study of AAT for persons with aphasia to
contribute to the evidence-base a clearly-defined and replicable method for incorporating animals into aphasia
treatment. The combination of these expected outcomes will make an important positive impact by
demonstrating the effects of human-canine interaction as part of aphasia treatment and by providing the
foundation upon which to expand aphasia rehabilitation research targeting handicapping effects of aphasia.