Phoneme: An individual sound in a word that signals a difference in meaning between two words.

Phonemic inventory: includes the phonemes that a child can produce.

Phonotactics: are the allowed combinations of phonemes in a given language.

Phonology is the study of the sounds in a language and the rules and ways in which they form words and sentences.

Phonological awareness is the ability to distinguish the sounds in words and manipulate them.

One subcategory of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Whereas phonological awareness focusses on all sizes of sound units such as words, syllables, and onset-rimes, phonemic awareness looks at the individual sounds in words.