Key Takeaways
- Phonological awareness refers to a person’s ability to pay attention to various sound units when recognizing a word.
- Phonemic awareness is the ability to focus on individual sounds in spoken languages and is considered a subsection of phonological awareness.
- Phonological awareness is the broader skill, while phonemic awareness is a sub-skill that focuses on blending, manipulating, and segmenting.
Key Difference – Phonological Awareness vs Phonemic Awareness
Phonological and phonemic awareness are related concepts that refer to two different skill sets. Phonological awareness is the ability to pay attention to various sound units when recognizing a word, while phonemic awareness is the ability to focus on individual sounds in spoken languages.
What is Phonological Awareness?
Phonology is the study of how sounds in a language are organized and used. Phonological awareness is the ability to focus on various sound units when recognizing a word. It includes several subsections such as awareness of onset and rime, rhythm, words, syllables, and phonemics. As a child develops, they begin to understand that language consists of different components, such as sentences made up of words, which can be separated into syllables. The child also learns to pay attention to alliteration, rhyme, and onset-rime. Onset refers to the first consonant, while rime refers to the rest of the sounds in a word.
What is Phonemic Awareness?
A phoneme is the smallest sound unit of language, capable of distinguishing one word from another. Phonemic awareness, considered a subsection of phonological awareness, is the ability to focus on individual sounds in spoken languages. As a child learns to recognize the individual sounds of a word, they develop specific sub-skills of manipulating, blending, and segmenting. Manipulation refers to adding or removing certain sounds in a word, blending is connecting sounds to create words, and segmenting is learning to break a word into sounds. Although phonological and phonemic awareness are interrelated, there is a clear difference between them.
What is the difference between Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness?
Phonological awareness is the broader skill that a child develops, while phonemic awareness is a sub-skill of phonological awareness. In phonological awareness, the emphasis is on onset and rime, rhythm, words, syllables, and phonemics. In phonemic awareness, the emphasis is on blending, manipulating, and segmenting.
