Excerpted from Appendix H of Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, by Louisa Cook Moats, Ed.D.

Copyright © 2000 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be quoted, reproduced, or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Affix A morpheme or meaningful part of a word attached before or after a root or base word to modify its meaning; a category that includes prefixes and suffixes.

Affricate Consonant phoneme articulated as a stop before a fricative, such as /c/ or /j/.

Agent Thematic role of the noun in a sentence whose referent performs the action of the verb (The girl threw the ball).

Allophone A predictable phonetic variant of a phoneme, such as nasalized vowels.

Allophonic variation Systematic variability in production of phonemes; the fact that speech sounds “heard” as the same phoneme differ slightly in articulation depending on where they occur in word, for example the aspirated and unaspirated forms [ph] and [p].

Alphabetic Pertaining to a writing system that uses a symbol for each speech sound of the language.

Alphabetic principle The use of letters and letter combinations to represent phonemes in an orthography.

Alveolar Consonant spoken with the tip of the tongue on the ridge behind the upper teeth, such as /t/.

Anaphora Referential linking between pairs of words within or between sentences; the process of replacing a longer word or phrase with a shorter one, as with the use of a pronoun for a noun or a noun phrase.

Antonyms Words considered to represent opposite meanings.

Articles Determiners; words in a grammatical class of noun modifiers that are not adjectives, such as the, a, an.

Assimilated prefix A prefix changed from its abstract form so that it matches the initial sound of the root to which it is attached, such as at in attach (ad + tach = attach).

Assimilation Process by which the phonetic features of one phoneme influence or are spread to a neighboring phoneme; assimilation results in phonemes becoming similar.

Automaticity Fluent performance without the conscious deployment of attention.

Auxiliary verbs Helping verbs that co-occur with a main verb to denote tense, aspect, or modality (I will have been gone).