More empirical data, especially those that tap both into the behavioral and neural patterns of phonological encoding, are crucially needed to resolve the debates. Therefore, the current study aims to extend the body of literature by examining Dutch-Cantonese bilinguals. The segment-retrieval hypothesis has been consistently supported in studies with Dutch-speaking individuals. On the contrary, Cantonese speakers have consistently shown a lack of initial phoneme onset priming, despite evidence that sub-syllabic units, such as consonant-vowel (CV) and rhyme, may serve as possible processing units (Wong and Chen, 2008, 2009; Wong et al., 2012). Specifically, we were interested in whether balanced Dutch-Cantonese bilinguals would demonstrate initial segment-based serial planning during speech production in their syllabic language (Cantonese) in the behavioral data. Furthermore, we were interested in how such an influence manifests itself in the ERP neural response patterns. In doing so, we aimed to bring in new data that may shed light on the existing debates concerning the universality of segment as a functional unit of speech encoding, and the possible mechanism that explains the mismatch of phoneme repetition priming effect between the ERP and behavioral responses.