Which activity describes phoneme blending?

• A. Sound isolation
• B. Alphabet recitation
• C. Word recognition
• D. Phoneme blending

Answer: (D)

Phoneme blending is taking separate sounds and putting them together to form a spoken word. This skill helps children decode new words by merging the individual phonemes, like hearing /m/ /æ/ /p/ and blending them to say “map.” It’s different from sound isolation, which asks you to identify the separate sounds inside a word; it’s different from alphabet recitation, which is simply reciting the letters of the alphabet; and it’s different from word recognition, which involves recognizing whole words by sight without blending sounds. So blending specifically describes combining phonemes to produce a spoken word.