This is supported more by dyslexic children who already struggle with phoneme discrimination, rather than students who are average readers. An alternative viewpoint, the phonological access deficit hypothesis states that dyslexic children have intact phonological representations but a deficit in assessing or manipulating these representations. In other words, difficulties in phonological representations become apparent when the tasks that are used to assess these representations place heavy demands on the abilities short- term memory or cognitive capacity. While it was not their intention, the researchers considered both the phonological deficit hypothesis and the phonological access deficit hypothesis in their experiment. Thirty- four children with dyslexia and 25 children (between the ages of 2 and 8) with average reading ability, (AR), were tested on their production and perception of consonants in naturally produced consonant- vowel (CV) words and multi-talker babble (talker variability). CVs were then read by the child. In the second task, the child identified the C in the CVs of children in the other group. The dyslexic group made slightly more identification errors than AR children but only for CVs where there was variability in