The concept that letters represent sounds in a language is known as

• A. Morphology
• B. Semantics
• C. Alphabetic principle
• D. Phonemic awareness

Answer: (C)

Letters representing spoken sounds are described by the alphabetic principle. This idea states there is a systematic relationship between the sounds of spoken language and the letters (or letter patterns) that represent those sounds in written form. Because of this relationship, readers can decode unfamiliar words by sounding them out and blending the sounds together, and they can spell by mapping sounds to letters.

Phonemic awareness, meanwhile, is about hearing and manipulating the individual sounds in words without focusing on how they’re written. Morphology deals with the smallest meaningful parts of words and how they combine to form new words, while semantics is about meaning. So the concept that links letters directly to spoken sounds, enabling reading and writing through sound-letter correspondences, is the alphabetic principle.