Chapter 3, Phonology

Session 3: Phonological and Phoneme Awareness

• Phonological awareness includes

• Recognizing and producing rhymes
• Phonological sensitivity: awareness of syllable and onset—rime segments
• Phoneme awareness: conscious awareness of individual phonemes in words
• These are metalinguistic skills
• These are oral language skills

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Progression of Phoneme Awareness
Development
• Acquired and refined gradually over several years
• From larger units of speech (words, syllables, onsets, rimes) to smaller units
(phonemes)
• From global processing of words to detailed insights into internal details of
the words’ sounds
• Both reading and spelling depend on proficiency with phoneme awareness

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Phonemes are the Anchors or “Parking Spots”
for Mapping Letters and Letter Combinations

/red/ /haz/
comb

/r/ /ĕ/ /d/

/h/ /ă/ /z/
/c/ /ō/ /m/
red
has
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A Point of Scientific Consensus:
The event that is critical for sight word learning is that, when they say the
word, the reader needs to look at the spelling and compute the connections
between graphemes and phonemes in order to retain the written form as a
sight word in memory.

Once readers know the grapho-phonic spelling system, they can learn to read
words and build a lexicon of sight words easily.

(L. C. Ehri, 1998)

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Progression of Early Phonological and
Phoneme Awareness Development
Rhyming Matching (Which words rhyme? Goat, say, boat)
Production (Tell me a word that rhymes with sock.)
Matching (Which picture starts with the same sound as
Alliteration
zoo?)
Categorization (Find all the things that start with /m/.)
Blending Syllables (Put this word together: kan – ga – roo)
Onset/rime units (Put this word together: s – ink)
Phonemes (Put this word together: sh – ee – p)
Segmenting Syllables (Say the syllables in Melanie.)
Onset/rime units (Break van into two parts.)
Phonemes (Say three sounds in mouse; move a chip into a
box as you say each sound.)
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Early Phonological Awareness (As
assessed by Kilpatrick’s Phonological Awareness
Screening Test, 2015)

Delete a syllable from a Say “bookcase.” Now

two-syllable word. say “bookcase” but
don’t say “case.”
Say “December.” Now say
Delete a syllable from a
“December” but don’t say
three-syllable word.
“de.”
EARLY
Delete an onset from a Say “feet.” Now say “feet”
Phonological single syllable. but don’t say /f/.

Sensitivity

Tasks
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Basic Phonological Awareness
(Kilpatrick’s PAST, 2015)

Delete a beginning
“Say sleep. Now say
phoneme from a word that
sleep but don’t say /s/.”
begins with a blend.

Substitute an initial
BASIC “Say true. Now say true
phoneme in a word but instead of /t/ say
Phoneme Awareness beginning with a blend. /g/.”

Tasks
Say wheat. Now say
Delete a final phoneme.
wheat but don’t say /t/.”

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Advanced Phonological Awareness
(Kilpatrick’s PAST, 2015)

Substitute a medial vowel in a “Say ran. Now say ran but instead
one-syllable word. of /a/ say /u/.”
Delete the second phoneme in “Say bread. Now say bread but
an initial blend. don’t say /r/.”

ADVANCED Substitute the second phoneme “Say crew. Now say crew but
in a blend. instead of /r/ say /l/.”
Phoneme

Awareness
“Say some. Now say some but
Tasks Substitute a final phoneme.
instead of /m/ say /n/.”

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Coarticulation: The Elusive Phoneme
• The stream of speech is unsegmented.
• Phonemes are smushed together or coarticulated.
• Coarticulation causes subtle variations in how phonemes are formed in the
mouth.
• This reality contributes to the difficulty of phoneme segmentation and,
ultimately, the mental mapping of sounds to letters.
• Spectrograms show these variations—the next slides show that initial “short
I” vowel (/ɪ/) is different depending on the sounds that follow it, and initial
“short e” varies as well.

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Allophonic Variation and Coarticulation

Indian

igloo

itch

©Anne Whitney, Ed.D., CCC-SLP

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Allophonic Variation and Coarticulation

elephant

egg

echo
©Anne Whitney, Ed.D., CCC-SLP

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Implication: Select Key Words for Short
(Lax) Vowels That Are the Least
Distorted
Better choices: Avoid these:

apple ant
itch igloo, iguana, Indian
up umbrella, uncle
octopus dog, owl
echo, Ed, edge egg, elephant, engine

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Word Walls Like This Are Not Helpful…
O E
one eye
once eat
only end
out every
open even
on
owl

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Minimal Pairs and Word Chains
• The words differ in only one phoneme; spelling is not a relevant factor in
identifying minimal pairs.
grass, glass, gloss, floss
• Word chains link words that differ in one phoneme—sounds are substituted,
added, deleted, changed in order
grass, glass, gas, guess, guest, best, bets

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Minimal Pairs: Workbook Exercise 30
(note that spelling of the words is irrelevant in
finding minimal pairs)

At Beginning of In Medial
Phoneme Contrast At End of Words
Words Position

/i/; /e/ eat/ate feed/fade plea/play

/a/; /ɔ/

/u/; /yu/ (limited possibilities)

/æw/; /ɔ/

/ɛ/; /ɪ/

/ʌ/; /ʊ/
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