FAQ's
The Phoneme Perception Test-Revised (PPT-R)
Is the PPT-R a 'pure' test of phoneme awareness/perception/processing?
No. The design of the PPT-R is to screen for the subject's ability to detect specific phonemes in his/her daily environment. As such, the subject's performance is affected by his/her attention, memory, knowledge of phoneme/grapheme relationship (i.e. spelling), etc. The PPT-R results should reflect the overall capabilities and limitations that the subject faces in his/her daily environment has been termed an "authentic" test in current educational jargon.
Does the PPT-R measure the subject's ability with specific phonemes or does it group all phonemes together?
The PPT-R allows the tester to view the subject’s ability with the 10 different phonemes (5 in each test, Part A and Part B) that represent the various degrees of sonorance and major categories of manner of articulation so that further exploration and remediation can focus on the specific phonemes of difficulty. The total scores can also be compared to that of the baseline norms to note the degree of overall difficulty with processing a number of phonemes.
Does this test determine whether the pre-, post- or inter-vocalic forms of the specific phonemes are the most difficult?
No. It is not designed to do this, as the number of targets for each phoneme is limited in this screening measure. However, a record of errors during the remediation process (using the Phoneme Perception Program being developed by M. Jerger) would allow the 'teacher' to determine the specific weaknesses within a given phoneme (e.g., post-vocalic /t/) and to focus on that weakness.
Any advantages over other tests?
Yes.
1. If used with other measures of phoneme awareness, it can provide additional information without some of the limitations that other impose. That is, it does not require the understanding of such concepts as "first" and "last"; manipulation of phonemes; rhyming; or, deletion, as do a number of measures.
2. It can assess phoneme awareness at the sentence level. The sentence level of the PPT-R, prerecorded and read at approximately one syllable per second, more closely reflects the natural daily experience of the subject.
3. It provides a proficiency score for 10 different phonemes (i.e., 5 phonemes in Part A and 5 in Part B)
4. It can be administered by an educator as it is prerecorded and the interjudge reliability with educators and speech pathologists was 0.97.
5. It can be followed with a remediation program tailored to the findings (i.e., This program can then target the specific phonemes found most difficult for the child.)
What can the PPT-R tell us that phonetic decoding cannot?
It is useful to compare the PPT-R results with the subject's decoding. For example, a subject with reasonable performance on tasks of decoding nonsense words may perform poorly on portions of the PPT-R (e.g., /r/ phoneme subtest), suggesting that the rate and context of normal speech are critical to that subject and that they are missing a wealth of information with that phoneme in their daily environment. Targeting the specific phoneme may decrease the hours needed for remediation. (I have completed a year of training for just such a student, a 22-year-old male who is now reading, though he could not do so after completing years in self-contained classrooms. His primary confusions were with /r/, /l/ and short vowels.)
Is the PPT-R useful for children and adults?
Yes. It is most useful for 2nd grade students and up through adulthood. However, this task was found to be difficult for most kindergarten students and many first grade students.