Which term is a basic unit of speech sounds that can be divided into parts?

• A. Phoneme
• B. Syllable
• C. Graphemes
• D. Orthography

Answer: (B)

Dividing speech into manageable chunks shows how spoken language is organized. A syllable is a unit of speech that contains a vowel sound and can be broken into parts: the onset (the initial consonants), the nucleus (the vowel), and the coda (the ending consonants). This makes syllables the basic unit that can be divided into these parts, which is exactly what the question describes. By contrast, a phoneme is the smallest sound that can change meaning and isn’t typically analyzed by onset/nucleus/coda, while graphemes and orthography refer to letters and spelling systems, not segments of spoken sound.