When learning about Phonological Awareness and its links to literacy, there are at times terms that need further explanation. Please find below a list of such terms and their definitions:
Word Meaning in the Context of Literacy Assessment and Intervention
Automaticity This is the noun form of automatic, meaning ‘without conscious thought’.
Auxiliary (verb) The verb forms that add number, tense and / or permission to an action word (e.g., ‘is running’; ‘was running’; ‘might run’).
CAP Central Auditory Processing: ‘Central’ means within the brain; ‘Auditory’ means hearing; therefore this is the act of the brain processing (or listening
to) what we hear, rather than the act of actually hearing sound (with the ears). ‘Hearing’ with the ears is part of the peripheral system.
Consonant All the sounds of the alphabet that are not vowels. All consonants are produced by the muscles of the mouth and tongue through a process of
constriction or stoppage of the outgoing airstream.
Decoding This refers to the act of reading written words.
Derivative A word that has its meaning and/or syntactical (grammatical) role changed due to an addition or deletion (e.g., ‘dog’ -> ‘dogs’; ‘marine’ -> ‘submarine’).
Diphthong Vowel sounds in which the sound changes during pronunciation (sometimes called a gliding vowel); e.g., in ‘voice, know, boy, road’.
Encoding This refers to spelling and writing words so that they can be read.
Graphemes The written letters which represent phonemes.
Letters The written forms of the alphabet.
Lexicon This is the mental dictionary of words held by the speaker of any language.
Metacognition Literally, this is having knowledge about thinking; or the demonstration of insight into the functions and abilities of the mind.
Metalinguistics Using language to talk about language, (e.g., explaining what a word is rather than its meaning).
PCD Phonological Core Dyslexia which refers to literacy learning failures related to Phonological Awareness in adults and adolescents.
Phoneme A phoneme is the name for the sounds of a spoken language – they represent the smallest phonetic unit that can carry meaning.
Phonics This is a way of teaching reading through teaching recognition of letters rather than the speech sounds, and rather than teaching whole words.
Phonetics Phonetics is the study of a speech system, i.e., the manner and place of speech sound production.
Phonological This refers to the rules for the use of sounds in any language (e.g., knowing that ‘mlik’ is not a legitimate combination of sounds in English).
PA Phonological Awareness; which refers to the ability to identify, separate, blend and manipulate sounds in spoken words.
Rime / Rhyme These refer to variants of the same word – however, in the study of phonology, ‘rime’ is used to refer to ‘syllabic rime’, so that the difference between this and poetic ‘rhyme’ can be distinguished. The rime is that part of a syllable from the first vowel to the end, e.g., /ot/ is the rime /dot/, /hot/, /got/
and so on. The first sound in those words (/d/, /h/, and /g/ is referred to as the ‘onset’. Thus, teaching phonology often refers to the teaching of
‘onset / rime’.
SBL Scenario-based learning. This is an interactive software used for creating learning scenarios.
Sounds Sounds are the smallest possible units of spoken words which carry meaning, (e.g., ‘frog’ has four sounds).
Semantics This refers to the study of how language conveys meaning, and includes information about words, phrases and sentences.
Syllables Syllables are the second smallest units of words and in English, each syllable is marked by a separate vowel sound (e.g., ‘meaning’ has two vowel sounds
and therefore two syllables – ‘mean’ and ‘ing’).
Syntax This refers to the rules and conventions for combining words into sentences in any written or spoken language, the study of which is called grammar.
Vowels These are the sounds of language that are spoken with an unobstructed airstream. In English every word must have at least one spoken vowel sound.