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Liaison is a sandhi process in French causing the production of a liaison consonant across a word boundary, the nature of the consonant being determined by Word 1. As such, it offers patterns of variation at word boundaries in continuous speech. Drawing on two dense corpora of parent-child interactions, our paper examines how the child proceeds to acquire this alternation. Our analysis focuses on the influence of parental input on the earliest liaisons produced by the child. We also consider the effect of socio-economic criteria on the child's speech segmentation and the speed of liaison acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]