This week’s reading on speech production reminded me of my experience working with speech therapists at the National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy (NCEFT), a non-profit organization that uses horses to assist mentally and physically disabled children and adults. Speech therapy is one of the services NCEFT offers to its patients.
You might be wondering how horses have anything to do with speech therapy. I was wondering that myself when I first started working there! The answer has to do with the complex processes of speech perception and production that we are studying in class. As we’re learning, speech and language development extend far beyond what occurs in the mouth. In fact, the ability to register, interpret, and process language and speech is a complex process that involves the coordination and integration of many physiological systems including our sensory systems, core strength, trunk control, and breath support.
Speech is a complex motor task. Equine-assisted speech therapy uses the movement of the horse to help children with speech and language delays and disorders to develop their sensory and motor skills, which are crucial in speech and language development. The horse’s movement causes movement in the patient, providing sensory input that the therapist uses to facilitate trunk control, stability, and breath support. This proprioceptive and vestibular sensory input from the horse combined with the auditory, visual, and tactile input from the therapist is not replicable a traditional clinical setting. Equine-assisted speech therapy provides a unique opportunity to target the systems most involved with speech production and stimulate them simultaneously. It can help patients with a variety of different speech disorders, including oral/verbal apraxia, dysarthria, and delays and disorders relating to articulation, phonology, and oral motor skills.
Working directly with the horses and patients, I was able to witness firsthand how the movement of the horse assists in speech therapy. During a typical session, the therapist would use a variety of tactile, auditory, and visual games to encourage the child to produce different sounds. The games included flashcards with different words and images, toys that played music, and bouncy balls— much like you’d expect to see in the clinic. The therapist would play these games with the patient while simultaneously placing the child in different positions on the horse to target certain areas of core stability, trunk control, breath support, and sensory input. The therapist would often put the child in a certain position on the horse (such as sideways, backwards, hands-and-knees, or face down on the belly, just to name a few) and ask me to produce certain complementary movements from the horse. A "shallow-serpentine", for example, builds lateral core strength by gently throwing the patient off balance through a series of S-shaped turns. In contrast, a "walk-halt” builds trunk control by giving the patient a mild whiplash effect from the horse quickly stopping and starting. The child’s position on the horse combined with these particular movements helps the child build up the sensory and motor skills they need for speech and language development.
The results are truly amazing. Equine-assisted speech therapy is frequently used for children with severe speech and language delays and disorders as a first-step treatment. Often times the patient is able to accomplish much more with the help of a horse’s motor and sensory input than in a normal clinical setting. In addition, parents have told me that the effects of equine therapy on their child’s speech abilities last for hours and sometimes even days after a session. If nothing else, equine-assisted speech therapy allows therapy to be disguised as fun in a much more natural and nurturing environment than a clinic.
If you’re interested in learning more about equine-assisted speech therapy, here’s a cool video you can watch!
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