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This paper concerns the french liaison acquisition process and how it can be linked to both word segmentation and formation. By clarifying the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of the complex phenomenon of liaison, strong evidences are provided for the understanding of how the processes of word segmentation and formation become more precise with lexical development. From the numerous experimental and naturalistic data conducted with children between the ages of 2 and 6, we can highlight a developmental scenario in three stages. Firstly, children seize sequences including the liaison and the word that follows it in the speech stream. Thus, they memorise different exemplars of the same word (/nurs/, /zurs/, /turs/ for the word ours ‘bear’, depending on the context in which the word is extracted). Secondly, they would learn the contextual dependencies of the exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence. In other words, they learn the correct links between the word before the liaison and an exemplar of the word following it ( un + nours, deux + zours, petit + tours). Thirdly, from 4 years onwards, children make others kinds of errors: overgeneralisation in non-liaison contexts ( un nèbre instead of un zèbre ‘a zebra’). Different hypotheses depending on the final lexical status of the liaison consonant are proposed to account for this later stage characterized by the formation of more abstract constructions including liaison.