AI Tutor
If you build a tower with snap cubes, you can pull it apart cube by cube. Spoken words work the exact same way with sounds!
A phoneme is a single tiny sound we speak, and segmenting means pulling a whole word apart into each separate sound.
How do we pull a word apart sound by sound? Let's start with a three-sound word.

Three-Sound Words

Say the word cat out loud like a slow-motion robot: /k/ ... /Γ¦/ ... /t/.
We hear three distinct sounds: the beginning sound /k/, the middle vowel sound /Γ¦/, and the ending sound /t/.
What happens when two consonants sit right next to each other at the start of a word?

Four-Sound Words with Blends

In the word stop, the /s/ and /t/ make a consonant blend β€” two consonant sounds right together that each keep their own separate sound.
When we segment stop, we get four sounds: /s/ ... /t/ ... /Ι’/ ... /p/.