This relates to a child’s ability to identify and blend together individual sounds to form words. This skill is considered important because it lays the foundation for early reading skills.
In therapy, speech therapists can address a child’s ability to blend sounds together, segment a word into sounds, compare the sounds of different words, rhyme words, and count the number of syllables in a word. This can improve reading and spelling by giving the child a better understanding of how the sounds form words and predict what sounds will make up specific words.
The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, (CTOPP) is utilized to assess a child’s phonological awareness skills. From this test, goals can be made to address in therapy.
Information taken from: Assessment in Speech-Language Pathology, A Resource Manual, 4th Edition. Kenneth G. Shipley