Adult studies in the fields of neurolinguistic and mental chronometry suggest that the syllable plays a functional role in handwritten word production. These studies support the hypothesis of a syllabified orthographic representation stored in the graphemic buffer. However, there remains the question of the cognitive mechanisms involved in this encoding of orthographic representations and, in particular, that of the processes related to the syllable. In the study reported here, we tested the hypothesis of an orthographic mental syllabary in long-term orthographic memory by exploring the impact of syllable frequency on handwritten latencies. Thirty participants handwrote the labels of one hundred and fifty images. Bayesian analyses indicated that the data support an absence of effect of syllable frequency. We propose an alternative hypothesis to the syllabary to account for the results in the literature. This respects the constraint of an absence of effect of syllable frequency in handwritten word production