A widely held assumption about dyslexia is that difficulties in accessing the constituentphonemes of the speech stream are responsible for specific reading and spelling difficulties. Inconsistent orthographies, however, the acquisition of accurate phonological recoding andphonemic awareness was found to pose much less difficulty than in English, and even dyslexicchildren were found to exhibit high levels of performance in phonemic segmentation (Wimmer,1993). Nevertheless, using a rather complex phonological awareness and manipulation task(spoonerisms: MAN–HAT → HAN–MAT), Landerl, Wimmer, and Frith(1997) found support for the original position on phonological awareness deficit, as both Germanand English dyslexic children showed poor performance. In the present studies, the spoonerismresponses of Landerl et al. were reanalyzed such that children were given credit for partiallycorrect responses (e.g., a response of HAN for MAN–HAT). Such partially correctresponses were taken to indicate full segmentation of both stimulus words at theonset–rime level. The effect of this rescoring was that the error rate dropped from76% to 26% for the English dyslexic children and from 63% to 15%for the German dyslexic children. Even higher performance levels, although not perfect as for theage-matched control children, were found on a nonword spelling task in both groups. A secondstudy examined the segmentation of consonant clusters in younger German dyslexic children andfound performance levels of about 90% correct when memory problems were ruled out.We argue that, at least in the context of a consistent orthography (and a phonics-based teachingapproach), deficits in phoneme awareness are only evident in the early stages of readingacquisition, whereas rapid naming and phonological memory deficits are more persistent indyslexic children.