The Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) Metric

TLDR

Research in normal and disordered phonology requires biolinguistically appropriate, psychometrically robust speech production measures whose conceptual and numeric properties must be well characterized, especially as such measures increasingly appear in large‑scale epidemiologic, genetic, and other descriptive‑explanatory database studies. This work provides a rationale for extending the articulation competence metric Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC), computed from a 5‑ to 10‑minute conversational speech sample. The authors extend PCC and discuss selecting one or more of ten related metrics for specific clinical and research needs. Reliability and standard error of measurement estimates are provided for nine of ten speech metrics, including PCC.

Abstract

Research in normal and disordered phonology requires measures of speech production that are biolinguistically appropriate and psychometrically robust. Their conceptual and numeric properties must be well characterized, particularly because speech measures are increasingly appearing in large-scale epidemiologic, genetic, and other descriptive-explanatory database studies. This work provides a rationale for extensions to an articulation competence metric titled the Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1982; Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, Best, Hengst, & Terselic-Weber, 1986), which is computed from a 5- to 10-minute conversational speech sample. Reliability and standard error of measurement estimates are provided for 9 of a set of 10 speech metrics, including the PCC. Discussion includes rationale for selecting one or more of the 10 metrics for specific clinical and research needs.