Which of the following phonemic awareness skills is being assessed?

Phonemic blending is the ability to combine individual phonemes to form a word. For instance, if given the sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/, a child demonstrates blending by identifying the word "cat." While this skill is important, it does not involve altering or manipulating the sounds, which is the focus of the assessed skill.

Phonemic segmentation refers to the ability to break down a word into its individual phonemes. For example, the word "dog" can be segmented into /d/, /o/, and /g/. This skill assesses a child's ability to recognize separate sounds in a word but does not encompass the ability to manipulate or change those sounds.

Phoneme deletion involves removing a phoneme from a word to create a new word, such as taking away the /s/ from "sand" to form "and." Although this reflects some manipulation of sounds, it is a specific type of manipulation rather than the broader concept of phoneme manipulation that also includes addition and alteration of sounds.