In my Foreword I wrote:
To date, there have been few tools available to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to assess young children’s emerging speech skills. The Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills™ (PEEPS) has been designed for young children (18–36 months of age) who have small vocabularies and limited inventories of speech sounds. The PEEPS™ is a unique evidence-based speech assessment and is a welcome addition to SLPs’ almost empty toolboxes for young children. The word list has been carefully selected using the authors’ extensive knowledge of young children’s vocabularies and emerging speech skills and children can enjoy the process of naming toys during “play” (i.e., assessment). The PEEPS™ profile is a “multilayered description of a child’s phonological system” (p. 5) that enables SLPs to gain an overview of children’s strengths and identify “warning signs” or “red flags for phonetic and phonological development” (p. 68).
The authors of the PEEPS™ are eminent authorities on children’s speech and have undertaken extensive research that underpins their conceptualization and operationalization of this unique tool. They have spent more than 15 years developing the PEEPS™ and the world has been waiting. The PEEPS™ has proven value for working with young children, including those with cleft lip and palate (Scherer et al., 2012).
