Despite the evidence for a core phonological deficit in dyslexia, the nature of this deficit at the
level of the phonological representation is not well understood. In this study, the auditory word
gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in
dyslexic and average readers. Although the dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and
rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of
acoustic–phonetic input required to identify sets of words that varied in word frequency
and phonological neighborhood density. These results indicate that input phonological processing,
as tapped by the gating task, is normal in this group of dyslexic children, whereas their deficits on
the RAN tasks suggest that there are problems with phonological retrieval. The implications of
these results are considered in relation to the phonological representations hypothesis of dyslexia;
the evidence suggests that what is impaired in dyslexia are the retrieval processes that operate on
phonological representations.