Page 4 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Review

• The Alphabetic Principle is the idea that letters can represent sounds.

• Phonemes are the smallest units of speech sounds.

• Graphemes are the symbols that represent phonemes (in English, they are letters).

• Digraphs are graphemes made up of more than one letter, such as “ch”.

• Segmenting means breaking down words into their component phonemes.

• Refer back to the Phonological Terms to review key terms.

At this point, you should know about the alphabetic principle and how graphemes and phonemes
come together to produce the language that we share. You should also have a basic grasp of the
specialized terminology of the discipline and be able to answer questions about phonemic
awareness.

Building on Phonemes

Let’s move from sound to meaning. A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that creates
meaning. We could combine /ch/ and /o/ and /k/, in that order, to form the word choke. Because we
need all of that word to convey any aspect of its intended meaning, the word {choke} is a morpheme.
In the word choker, the {-er} at the end is also a morpheme. Why? Because {-er} conveys meaning all
by itself: It tells the listener that we’re referring to one who does the first part of the word; that is, one
who chokes. Adding yet another morpheme, the plural {-s}, now tells us that there are at least two
who choke. Like the slashes used to indicate phonemes, brackets are used to indicate morphemes.

Let’s use what we know to answer the following question.