The status of postvocalic liquids and nasals in the nucleus and coda is investigated using speakers who are illiterate in their mother tongue, Low German, but are literate in a second language, English. Using two experimental techniques, it was found that the postvocalic resonants form part of the nucleus, that there was a hierarchy of cohesiveness depending on the resonant and that the complexity of the coda affects the cohesiveness of the vowel-resonant nucleus. Given the varying cohesiveness of the nucleus, a scalar bonding model of the syllable was proposed as more suitable than a strictly hierarchical one.