What activity involves children combining separately spoken phonemes to form a word?

The activity of combining separately spoken phonemes to form a word is known as phoneme blending. This process involves children listening to individual sounds, such as /c/, /a/, and /t/, and then merging these sounds together to articulate the word "cat." Phoneme blending is a crucial skill in early reading development as it helps children understand how sounds work together to form words, which is essential for reading fluency.

In contrast, phoneme categorization involves recognizing which phoneme is different from others in a group, phoneme isolation focuses on identifying individual phonemes in a word, and phoneme segmentation requires breaking a word down into its individual sounds. Each of these activities plays a role in phonemic awareness but does not involve the specific skill of combining sounds into a cohesive word, making phoneme blending the correct choice in this context.