Three monitoring experiments are reported investigating the role of the syllable in spoken Dutch. Subjects detected prespecified targets (eg, daa or daal) that did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of a word {daa. ling and daal. def) or pseudoword (daa. les and daal. sel). In addition, carrier words varied in whether they had clear or ambisyllabic structure (eg, kofrrjel versus kor. ting). No evidence for a syllabic segmentation routine was found. These findings are consistent with the absence of a syllable effect in English which is, like Dutch, another stress-based language.