What is Phonemic Awareness?

Definitions:

• Phoneme: A phoneme is a speech sound. It is the smallest unit of language and has no inherent meaning.
• Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words, and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References). Phonemic awareness involves hearing language at the phoneme level.
• Phonics: use of the code (sound-symbol relationships to recognize words.
• Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of language. This is an encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level.
• Continuous Sound: A sound that can be prolonged (stretched out) without distortion (e.g., r, s, a, m).
• Onset-Rime: The onset is the part of the word before the vowel; not all words have onsets. The rime is the part of the word including the vowel and what follows it.
• Segmentation: The separation of words into phonemes.