Several studies investigating Sinitic languages have challenged the universality of phoneme as a functional unit of planning. Natural slips of the tongue in Mandarin Chinese rarely cause phoneme-sized errors (Chen, 2000). The same experimental paradigms used in Western languages discussed above did not find evidence of phoneme onset facilitation in varieties of Sinitic languages. For example, no facilitation was found in the implicit priming paradigm (Chen et al., 2002 for Mandarin, Chen et al., 2002; O'Seaghdha et al., 2010; Cantonese: Wong et al., 2012), the picture-word interference paradigm (Wong and Chen, 2008 for Cantonese), the primed word naming paradigm (Chen and Li, 2011 for Mandarin), the primed picture-naming task (Yu et al., 2014 for Mandarin), or the color-object picture naming task (Qu et al., 2012 for Mandarin). More specifically, in the latter paradigm, participants were asked to name the color and object of a picture drawing. No facilitation was present when the first phoneme of the color and object matched. O'Seaghdha et al. (2010) therefore states that Germanic and Sinitic languages differ in the proximate unit for initial phonological processing. Phonological encoding during lexical retrieval in languages such as Mandarin, a Sinitic language, seems to begin with syllable retrieval, which constitutes as the initial functional unit of phonological encoding, which subsequently is followed by retrieval of individual phonemes within the syllable frame for articulation. In languages such as Japanese, this initially retrieved syllabic unit is called a mora (e.g., Kureta et al., 2006; Verdonschot et al., 2011). In contrast to Mandarin and Japanese, in languages such as English, a Germanic language, the phoneme is retrieved as the primary functional unit.