What term describes the ability to recognize sound units within spoken words?

• A. Alphabetic knowledge
• B. Juncture
• C. Phonemic awareness
• D. Prior knowledge

Answer: (C)

Recognizing sound units within spoken words is phonemic awareness. It means hearing, identifying, and manipulating the individual sounds—phonemes—in spoken language. This skill underpins blending sounds to form words and segmenting words into their component sounds, which are essential for decoding when reading and for accurate spelling. For example, hearing the sounds in “cat” as /k/ /æ/ /t/ and blending them to say the whole word, or breaking a word apart into its separate sounds. This is different from alphabetic knowledge, which focuses on letters and their sounds, and from juncture, which is about pauses or boundaries between sounds or words, not the internal sound units themselves, and from prior knowledge, which is background information a reader brings to a text.