Phonology & Phonemes
The study of the rule system by which speech sounds are sequenced, combined, and pronounced to form words.
What is phonology?
The study of how speech sounds are physically produced.
What is articulatory phonetics?
Clapping syllables in a word is an example of this broader type of awareness.
What is phonological awareness?
Vowels are described this way because airflow is open and unobstructed.
What is an open phoneme?
A student spelling "went" as "wet" is making an error related to which phonological aspect?
What is the nasalization of a vowel before a nasal consonant?
The smallest unit of sound in a language that can change word meaning
What is a phoneme?
This type of sound is formed by obstructing airflow with the teeth, lips, or tongue
What is a consonant?
Conscious awareness of individual speech sounds in syllables and the ability to manipulate them.
What is phonemic awareness?
This "empty" vowel sound appears in unaccented syllables, like the 'a' in about.
What is the schwa?
If a student confuses /f/ and /th/ sounds, what teaching strategy is most helpful?
Having the student look in a mirror while the teacher describes and produces each sound.
This term refers to the multiple functions involved in perceiving and producing speech sounds.
What is phonological processing?
Name a common pair of English consonant phonemes formed the same way in the mouth, but one is voiced and the other is unvoiced.
What are /t/ and /d/ or /f/ and /v/?
The research-backed recommendation for daily phonemic awareness instruction time in kindergarten or first grade.
What is 5-10 minutes daily?
A vowel sound that involves a gliding mouth position, such as the ou in couch
What is a diphthong?
This term describes a sound (like /ch/) combining features of stops and fricatives.
What is an affricate?
An intelligible version of a language with systematic differences in phonology, word use, and/or grammatical rules.
What is a dialect?
When sounds influence the features of preceding or following sounds in a word, such as the vowel in "went" becoming nasalized.
What is coarticulation?
The most challenging advanced phoneme awareness skill for children.
What is the ability to delete the second phoneme in a CCVCC pattern (e.g., saying sip without the /s/ in slip)?
What makes r-controlled vowel sounds difficult for students?
The r changes or "takes over" the preceding vowel sound.
Two or three consonant phonemes appearing together before or after a vowel, such as str in street.
What is a consonant blend?
Slight, predictable changes in pronunciation based on a sound's context in a word (e.g., the different /p/ sounds in pin and spin).
What are allophonic variations or allophones?
A two-letter combination representing a single sound where neither letter makes its usual sound, like sh or ch.
What is a digraph?
Which two cognitive functions related to phonological processing are not directly taught in the classroom?
What are phonological working memory (PWM) and rapid automatic naming (RAN)?
The vowel sounds linguists classify as "tense".
What are the /e/ (long e) and /yu/ (long u) sounds?
True or False: Adults often miscount phonemes in a word by counting letters instead of sounds.
What is True?