Never heard of a phoneme, have you?
In the human language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound and is one of the MOST important aspects of learning to read because without learning how to isolate individual sounds a child can not learn to connect units of sound or isolate units within larger groups of sounds.
For example, isolated sounds are connected to written letter forms and children can easily match the same beginning or ending sounds (unless there are some learning disabilities like auditory processing).
Cat, bat, mat,
Note that phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve words in print …read more