What is the term for the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual phonemes?

Phonemic awareness refers to the specific skill of recognizing and working with individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken language. This understanding is crucial for literacy development because it enables learners to comprehend how sounds blend to form words. By cultivating phonemic awareness, children can improve their ability to decode new words and enhance their reading skills. This skill involves activities such as segmenting words into their constituent sounds, blending phonemes to form words, and manipulating sounds within words, all of which are essential precursors to phonics instruction.

In contrast, phonological awareness encompasses a broader range of skills, including the awareness of larger units of sound such as syllables and rhymes, but it is not limited to the recognition of individual phonemes. Other options like phonetic recognition and phoneme manipulation focus on different aspects of sound awareness and use, underscoring why phonemic awareness specifically addresses the understanding of spoken words at the phoneme level.