What learning process allows children to connect only some letters and sounds in words?

The learning process that permits children to connect only some letters and sounds in words is characterized by the Partial Alphabetic stage. In this stage, children begin to recognize that letters correspond to sounds, but their understanding is not yet complete. They might be able to identify the initial consonant sounds in words and make some connections with letters, but do not fully grasp all the letter-sound relationships.

This is crucial for early literacy development because it represents a transitional phase where children are experimenting with phonetic elements of words. They may know a few letters and their corresponding sounds and can decode simple words, but their knowledge is not comprehensive. This contrasts with the Full Alphabetic stage, where children can connect all the letters in a word to their corresponding sounds, allowing for a more complete understanding of spelling and pronunciation. Similarly, in the Pre-Alphabetic stage, children might recognize some words based on visual cues without connecting any letters to sounds, and Phoneme Mapping involves a more structured analysis of phonemes that is beyond the Partial Alphabetic stage.