Phonics

Grapheme

A grapheme is a written or printed letter symbol used to represent a speech sound or phoneme.

Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaningful unit of language. The word cat is a morpheme whose pronunciation consists of three phonemes. If one wishes to speak of more than one cat, the letter s forming the plural cats becomes a morpheme, since it changes the meaning ( as does the possessive's in the cat's dinner). These are two classes of morphemes, free and bound. Free morphemes function independently in words such as man, house, look. Bound morphemes consist of prefixes, suffixes, and inflectional endings and must combine with other morphemes as in man's, houses, looked.

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that distinguishes one word from another. Pronouncing the word cat involves blending three phonemes: /k/ /ae/ /t/. There are 44 phonemes in the English language; 25 of these are consonant phonemes and 19 are vowel phonemes. There are however over 200 ways to spell the 44 phonemes and this is one reason spelling in English is a challenge.

Rime

A rime is the vowel or vowel and consonant(s) that follow the onset. In the word name, ame is the rime.

Onset

An initial consonant or consonant cluster is an onset. In the word name, n is the onset; in the word blame, bl is the onset.

Phonemic segmentation

Breaking a syllable or word into its constituent phonemes [top = /t/ /o/ /p/]. This is a skill that is necessary for young children to become readers and writers. The ability to segment phonemes is an indicator of early reading success. Phoneme segmentation assessments are often given to emergent and beginning readers.

Alphabetic Principle

The alphabetic principle is the concept that letters and letter combinations are used to represent phonemes in orthography. Graphic symbols (alphabet letters) and their order of occurrence have been universally agreed upon. The goal is to arrive at the spoken word that the various letters represent. This is done by blending the sounds represented by the letters to arrive at the spoken word (car, carp, carpet).

Grapheme-phoneme Relationship

This term refers to the relationship between printed letters and the sounds they represent; it also covers the deviations found in such a relationship. Thus, while English writing is based on an alphabetic code, there is not a one-to-one relationship between graphemes (printed symbols) and the phonemes (speech sounds) they represent. Some printed symbols represent several different sounds (cent, coat, car, cake), and one speech sound may be represented by many different letters or combinations of letters.