Phonological Awareness Skills Flashcards

A second-grade student with dyslexia performs well on rhyme recognition but poorly on phoneme reversal tasks (e.g., say 'top' backwards). This profile is MOST consistent with:

Answer: Preserved gross phonological awareness with deficits in complex phoneme manipulation

Students with dyslexia often retain coarser phonological skills like rhyming but show pronounced deficits on tasks requiring complex phoneme manipulation such as reversal.

Which phonological awareness skill is typically the LAST to develop in the normal sequence?

Answer: Phoneme manipulation (e.g., deletion, reversal)

Complex phoneme manipulation tasks such as deletion and reversal represent the highest level of phonological awareness and emerge latest in typical development.

A CALT uses Elkonin boxes during intervention. The PRIMARY phonological awareness skill being targeted is:

Answer: Phoneme segmentation

Elkonin sound boxes are designed to help students segment words into individual phonemes by pushing tokens into boxes for each sound.

During intervention, a CALT introduces spoonerisms (e.g., swap the first sounds of 'fish tank' to get 'tish fank'). This activity targets which phonological awareness skill?

Answer: Phoneme transposition/substitution across words

Spoonerisms require students to delete and transpose initial phonemes between two words, targeting complex phoneme manipulation at a high metalinguistic level.

A student correctly identifies that 'cat,' 'cup,' and 'coat' begin with the same sound. This skill is BEST described as:

Answer: Alliteration awareness (initial phoneme identity)

Recognizing that multiple words share the same initial phoneme is the definition of alliteration awareness, a form of initial phoneme identity.

Which assessment finding would MOST strongly indicate that a student requires phonological awareness intervention before phonics instruction is introduced?

Answer: Inability to segment spoken words into phonemes despite adequate language comprehension

Phoneme segmentation is a foundational prerequisite for phonics; a student who cannot segment spoken words will struggle to map graphemes to phonemes during decoding instruction.

A CALT is selecting phonological awareness tasks for a kindergartner at the very beginning of instruction. Which sequence follows the recommended developmental order from easiest to hardest?

Answer: Rhyme recognition → syllable counting → phoneme segmentation

The developmental hierarchy progresses from larger, easier units (rhymes, syllables) to smaller, harder units (individual phonemes), so rhyme recognition precedes syllable counting which precedes phoneme segmentation.