The concept of a "mental syllabary", i.e., a store of syllable-sized motor planning units, has become a cornerstone in the modeling of spoken language production. This idea lead to the question of the significance of syllabic representations in speech impairments, especially in apraxia of speech, but also in other fields of neurolinguistic inquiry (e.g. phonemic paraphasia or dyslexia). The Special Issue The syllable and beyond - New evidence from disordered speech" presents a cross-section of the current discussion on the role of the syllable in speech and language processing in neurologic and neuro-degenerative disorders.