| The purpose was to determine if there is comparative benefit to using animal-assisted therapy (AAT) to improve language during social interactions between a child with a language impairment and a typically developing peer. This investigation expanded on the work of Martin and Farnum (2002), and utilized an alternating treatment design to compare three treatment conditions: animal-assisted therapy, a toy animal, and a preferred activity. Participants included 3 Caucasian females, ages 4 to 8 years, that were receiving speech-language therapy for expressive language impairments and either attended full-time programming or after-school programming at a developmental preschool. Each participant was matched with a typically-developing peer to form a dyad that was consistent throughout the 12 week study. Each dyad attended three treatment sessions per week with one treatment condition presented once per week for 12 weeks. Behaviors targeted for evaluation included verbal initiations, verbal responses, verbal continuations, and non-task related behaviors. An interval recording session was used to obtain data on targeted behaviors using videotapes of sessions. Results offer only tentative support for a comparative benefit to using animal-assisted therapy. Visual inspection of the data indicate that 2 subjects demonstrated increased verbal continuations in the animal-assisted treatment condition when compared with the remaining treatment conditions. No advantage to using animal-assisted therapy when compared with a toy animal or preferred activity is observed in data of verbal initiations, verbal responses, or non-task responses. A discussion of verbal continuations is included. Both implications and limitations of the study are also discussed. This study has implications for the field of animal-assisted therapy as well as speech-language therapy. |
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