fMRI evidence with Mandarin speakers also argued for the distinctive neural representations of phonemes and syllables (Yu et al., 2015; see also findings in Peeva et al., 2010 on distinct activation patterns for phoneme and syllable in French). For phoneme activation both studies show activation of the pallidum and putamen. Yu shows additional activation of the STg region, which seems specifically activated for Chinese languages (Fu et al., 2002). While we note that the interpretation of cognitive processes based on neurophysiological observations has to be taken with caution (Munding et al., 2016) the above mentioned studies seem to suggest that there is a potentially more important role of the segment in speech encoding for Sinitic languages than previously suggested, which raises the question of the mechanism that explains the lack/presence of phoneme repetition priming effect in the behavioral response time data.