Which concept states that letters represent spoken sounds in reading and writing?

• A. Assonance
• B. Alphabetic Principle
• C. Cues
• D. Anchor Book

Answer: (B)

The main idea here is that written symbols correspond to spoken sounds, and those sounds can be blended to read and broken apart to spell. This mapping between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) is captured by the Alphabetic Principle. It explains how we sound out words like cat by recognizing that the sounds /k/ /æ/ /t/ align with the letters C-A-T, and how we spell them by representing those same sounds with letters. This principle is fundamental for both decoding during reading and encoding during writing, forming the basis for early literacy skills. Other terms describe different things—assonance is a poetic device about repeating vowel sounds, cues refer to strategies for guessing meaning, and an anchor book is just a reference resource—not the idea that letters map to sounds. So the Alphabetic Principle is the correct concept.