New Hampshire Foundations of Reading Practice Test

Which of the following is NOT a skill associated with phonemic awareness?

1. Phoneme isolation

2. Phoneme blending

3. Phoneme recognition

4. Phoneme substitution

The correct answer is: Phoneme recognition

Phonemic awareness encompasses a range of skills that involve the recognition and manipulation of phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound in spoken language. Each of the skills listed in the choices pertains to this domain, except for one. Phoneme isolation allows individuals to identify and isolate individual sounds within words. For instance, in the word "bat," a person skilled in phoneme isolation can identify the initial sound /b/. Phoneme blending is the ability to combine individual sounds to form a word. For example, if given the sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/, a person would be able to blend them to produce the word "cat." Phoneme substitution involves changing one phoneme in a word to create a new word. For instance, if you substitute the /h/ in "hat" for /s/, you get "sat." Phoneme recognition, while it may seem similar, is less often referenced as a distinct skill in the context of phonemic awareness. It typically doesn't specify the depth of manipulation or identification as the other skills do. Instead, phoneme recognition tends to refer to the general acknowledgement or identification of sounds without involving active manipulation—making it less aligned with the traditional set of phonemic