Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to attend, identify, and manipulate a variety of sounds within the speech stream. It implies conscious knowledge, at any age, of the sound structure of spoken words, from syllables to phonemes. Phonemic awareness (or phoneme awareness) is one aspect of PA, related to consciousness of the smallest speech units: the consonant and vowel phonemes, displayed here in slashes (//). Other aspects of PA are the skills of detecting rhymes and alliteration; recognizing that words within the speech stream can be broken down into smaller chunks such as syllables and phonemes; using metalanguage to talk about, reflect upon, and manipulate phonemes; and understanding, explicitly, the relationship between spoken and written language.

As a subtype of PA, phonemic awareness relates to an ...