What study area examines the sounds letters make and the letters used to represent those sounds?

• A. Phonics
• B. Phonology
• C. Morphology
• D. Semantics

Answer: (A)

This question focuses on how letters map to spoken sounds and how we encode those sounds with written symbols. That study is phonics, which teaches the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent and how to blend or segment those sounds to read and spell words. For example, knowing that the digraph “sh” stands for the sound /ʃ/ in words like shark helps decode and spell, and recognizing that the same letter can represent different sounds in different words—such as the letter “a” in cat versus cake—illustrates using letter-sound knowledge in reading. Phonology, by contrast, looks at the sound system of a language—the actual sounds and how they connect—without focusing on letters. Morphology studies the meaningful parts of words (roots, prefixes, suffixes), and semantics concerns meaning. So the study of how letters represent sounds is phonics.