My commentary concerns the relationship between the development of segmental analysis abilities during reading and writing acquisition in the alphabetic system between 4 and 9 years of age and the capacity for segmental analysis of speech in the course of early speech acquisition, during the two first years of life. Morais et al. make only a brief comment on this problem (p. 426). From my point of view the description of the steps of early speech production has many similarities to the development of segmental analysis. During his first year, the baby elaborates elementary components (isolated, juxtaposed or reduplicated) of a syllabic nature which come from a new perceptual encoding of the phonological strings leading the baby to produce specific articulatory patterns at the syllabic level. Thus, at around one year there is an integration of these components which gives rise to words. Then these words become decomposable, first into syllabic units defined by their relative positions in the words, and then into more abstract phonemic units (Menyuk & Menn, 1979; Dromi, 1986). These two developmental sequences are resulting from constructions elaborated by children interacting with their environments. Comparisons between these sequences should improve our understanding of developmental mechanisms or processes.