The terms phonology and phonological refer to the sound structure of speech and, in particular, to the perception, representation, and production of speech sounds. Phonemes are the speech phonological units that make a difference to meaning. It differs by only one phoneme from each of the spoken words, soap , rode , and rip .
Phonemic awareness is the insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes.
Because phonemes are the units of sound that are represented by the letters of an alphabet, an awareness of phonemes is key to understanding the logic of the alphabetic principle and thus to the learnability of phonics and spelling. Phonological awareness is a more inclusive term than phonemic awareness and refers to the general ability to attend to the sounds of language as distinct from its meaning. Phonemic awareness generally develops through other, less subtle levels of phonological awareness. Speech discrimination , including phonemic discrimination , is distinguished from phonemic awareness because the ability to detect or discriminate even slight differences between two spoken words does not necessarily indicate an awareness of the nature of that difference. Moreover, the study of the phonetics indicates that, both within and between speakers, there are many variations in the acoustic and articulatory properties of speech, including phonemes, that are not functionally significant to meaning.