AMPR is a program for computing the phonological plausibility of spellings. It is designed specifically to evaluate early spellings by children, at a level of development where it is useful to tease apart spellings that are random strings of letters from spellings that (are beginning to) use letters to spell sounds, albeit not necessarily in a conventional way. The test was developed by Rebecca Treiman and implemented by Brett Kessler. Currently the test assumes General American pronunciations, and so will be most reliable when applied to North American speech. It is described in the following paper:
AMPR may be run from our server via the query page.
Those wishing to run the program on their own computer may download the .tgz file. The program was developed on a SuSE Linux system using Perl 5.8.0 and so should run out of the box on a current Linux/Unix system or Mac OS X. If your system does not have Perl (most Windows computers do not) or if you suspect yours is out of date, it may be installed from http://www.perl.com