What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, known as phonemes, in spoken words. This skill is crucial for developing reading and spelling abilities because it allows learners to understand that words are made up of distinct sounds. For example, being able to segment the sounds in a word like "cat" into /k/, /æ/, and /t/ supports children in connecting these sounds to the corresponding letters when they begin to read and write. Phonemic awareness does not involve written language; rather, it focuses solely on the auditory aspect of language processing.

The other choices refer to skills that are not directly related to phonemic awareness. Fluent reading with proper intonation involves prosody and reading comprehension, which come after phonemic awareness. Understanding and analyzing written texts relate to comprehension skills, while memorizing vocabulary words and definitions focuses more on rote memory rather than the auditory manipulation of sounds within words. Therefore, the definition of phonemic awareness aligns directly with the ability to work with the sounds in spoken language.