| Term | Definition |
|---|
| linguistics | the study of language and how it works |
| phonics | the relationship between sounds and spellings |
| phoneme | the smallest unit of sound in speech |
| grapheme | the written representation of a sound |
| orthography | spelling |
| consonant | 21 letters of the alphabet |
| vowel | 5 letters (a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y) continuous sounds |
| diacritical marks | symbols that mark the unique sound of a letter |
| macron | marks a long vowel (the vowel says its name) |
| breve | marks a short vowel |
| blend | a consonant cluster where each consonant keeps its own sound (cl, pr, str, sp) |
| consonant digraph | a consonant cluster that makes only one sound (sh, ch, th, wh, ph) |
| vowel pair (vowel digraph) | two vowels that work together to make the first vowel long ("when two vowels go walking the first does the talking") |
| dipthong | a vowel sound which requires the mouth to change when making it |
| "silent e" | makes the vowel long |
| r controlled vowels | vowel sound is changed by the "bossy r" (ar,er, ir, or, ur) |
| variant vowels | alternative sounds from vowel pairings ("oo" in book) |
| schwa sound | "u" sound as in "the" |
Combine with other sets
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