Photo Articulation Test, Third Edition

(PAT-3)

Publisher/Date:
• PRO-ED, Inc., 8700 Shoal Creek Blvd., Austin, TX 78758-6897. Published,
1997.

Purpose:
• Individually-administered articulation inventory for children 3-8 years of
age.

Provides:
• Measurement of articulation through naming pictures and repeating
stimulus words. Voice quality, language use, fluency, and intelligibility are
assessed through the test’s final items which require the child to verbalize
a “story” around stimulus pictures.

Standardization Issues:
• The test’s norms were based on 800 children from 24 states, and included
children identified with speech-language disabilities. Purportedly, the
demographics for the norm sample closely matched US demographics for
that time period.

Reliability and Validity Issues:

• Internal consistency estimates for each age-level yielded acceptable
reliability results. Examples of content-, criterion-, concurrent-, and
construct-validity evidence are cited in the manual and appear sufficient to
support its use as an articulation inventory.

Additional Points:
• The authors’ statistical analysis for item bias on the basis of gender, race
(White/Non-White), and ethnicity (Hispanic/Non-Hispanic) suggested no
evidence of bias.
• No data on interrater reliability is reported, however, interscorer reliability
(based on 2 scorers independently scoring 20 already-completed
protocols) showed a high degree of scoring consistency.
• The test does not provide any specific framework for remedial activities,
which lies in the hands of skilled clinicians to develop.
• Item discrimination analysis of the total (standardization) sample
suggested that most children made less than 10% errors, suggesting that
the test may not be especially sensitive to discriminating variable-degrees
of development.
• The test is not normed for dialectical speakers, so care must be taken in
interpreting results from children whose language contains natural
dialectical variations, such as AAE (African American English). A brief
overview of Morphosyntactic AAE features based on independent studies
from 1994 and 2006 is retrievable at:
http://www.txsha.org/Convention/pdf/Switzer,%20Kathy-AAE.pdf