Segmenting words into their individual phonemes (explicit phonemic awareness) might require the use of abstract representations. To explore this hypothesis, we designed a phoneme monitoring task and examined how articulatory suppression and auditory interference affected performance in French-speaking adults with typical reading abilities. We controlled for the cognitive cost of dual-tasking by adding a semantic task. Contrary to our expectations, participants’ scores were lower and reaction times longer under articulatory suppression, a finding that could not be attributed to interference from auditory feedback during articulation. We discuss potential linguistic and individual factors that might account for these unexpected results.