Typical words in some East Asian languages, including Chinese, have reduced historically from disyllabic to monosyllabic and then open monosyllables. More recently, in some of those languages, many monosyllabic forms again emerge as disyllabic. Apparently disparate segmental phonological processes decreased monosyllabic word templates and apparently disparate morphological and phonological processes have produced novel disyllables, which can all be captured in terms of preferred prosodic templates.