Foundational Linguistic Knowledge

Question 1

What is a phoneme?

Answer 1

A phoneme is a speech sound. It’s the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another.

Question 2

How many phonemes in English language?

Answer 2

Approximately 44

Question 3

How many consonant phonemes in English?

Answer 3

24 (includes ng, th, ch)

Question 4

What are some irregular consonant phonemes?

Answer 4

C - can be pronounced soft or hard,
N - when combined with g to make “ng”
X - no x phoneme as it’s a combo of K and S
th - voiced (them), th - unvoiced (think)

Question 5

How many vowel phonemes are there?

Answer 5

20 (short, long, diphthong)

Question 6

What is a diphthong?

Answer 6

A vowel sound that begins in one place of articulation and moves to another (a vowel sound that changes slightly as it’s pronounced) such as bOY OUt AIr

Question 7

What is a grapheme?

Answer 7

The letter(s) that represent individual phonemes. They spell out the individual sounds.

Question 8

What is a digraph?

Answer 8

A single sound represented by two letters (ng, sh, ch, th, ck)

Question 9

What is a trigraph?

Answer 9

A single sound represented b 3 letters (are, igh, air, tch)

Question 10

What’s the rule for sounding out words that have vowel digraphs?

Answer 10

If two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking!

Question 11

What are some vowel sounds that can be represented by digraphs?

Answer 11

ie, ee, ea

Question 12

Every syllable must contain at least one:

Answer 12

vowel sound

Question 13

You can count syllables in a word by counting the:

Answer 13

vowel sounds

Question 14

G can only be pronounced “j” before:

Answer 14

e, i, y

Question 15

CK is used to make the “k” phoneme at the end of a word after:

Answer 15

a short vowel

Question 16

C is pronounced “s” when it comes before:

Answer 16

e, i, or y

Question 17

No English words will ever end in:

Answer 17

i, u, v, or j

Question 18

What is the Floss rule?

Answer 18

Consonants F, L, S are doubled at the end of one syllable words with a short vowel sound - all, less, buzz, stiff

Question 19

What is the Doubling Up rule:

Answer 19

In one syllable words with one vowel, the final consonant is doubled when adding a suffix that begins with a vowel - such as plan - planning, big - biggest, sto - stopping

Question 20

What is a meaning or lexical word

Answer 20

They allow new additions and provide information to a sentence (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns)

Question 21

A grammatical word is:

Answer 21

Provides structure to a sentence (determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns)