Which phonological awareness skill involves recognizing and manipulating sounds?

Phoneme manipulation is a comprehensive phonological awareness skill that encompasses various actions involving sounds. This skill allows individuals to recognize, alter, and operate with phonemes in spoken language, which is crucial for developing reading and spelling abilities.

When learners manipulate sounds, they can engage in activities such as changing one sound in a word to create a new word (e.g., changing the /c/ in "cat" to /h/ to form "hat"). This ability to consciously work with sounds directly supports their understanding of the phonemic structure of language, which is vital for deciphering and encoding words.

In contrast, the other skills listed—segmentation, addition, and isolation—focus on specific tasks within the broader context of sound manipulation. Segmentation involves breaking a word down into its individual phonemes, addition entails creating a new word by adding a phoneme, and isolation refers to identifying a specific phoneme within a word. While these are all important components of phonological awareness, manipulation encompasses a wider range of sound-related tasks and ultimately supports more advanced literacy skills.