The primary use of sequence monitoring (also known as syllable or fragment monitoring) has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition, and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets that are either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. Faster detection latencies to congruent targets are taken to indicate their perceptual relevance. For example, the finding that subjects are faster to detect a target when it corresponds to the érst syllable of the carrier than when it corresponds to more or less than the first syllable is called a syllable effect. This effect is interpreted as evidence for the perceptual relevance of the syllable. Since most research with this task has focused on the generalisability of the syllable effect across languages, this paper will focus primarily on this effect.