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This paper presents a new analyse of acquisition of liaison in French, supporting that liaison errors that are systematically observed between 2 and 3 years in the context of obligatory liaison (determiner + noun, i.e. un-n-ours [nu?s] a bear’ could be produced like un-z-ours [zu?s], or un-t-ours [tu?s]) are consecutive to the segmentation of the determiner which is originally produced as a proto-form completely integrated to the lexical unit. Analyses of data suggest that children procede in a “template” that is the domain of their generalisations ant that they apply systematically the Maximal Onset Principle to perform their segmentation. The paper supports a conception of phonological acquisition that is guided by general universal principles of grammar and morphological bootstrapping and not by a lexical storage of suppletive forms that the child should find out in the speech signal during the processing.