Language acquisition in infants and adults depends upon both the segmentation of the words in the speech chain and the extraction of language-specific regularities, particularly prosodic regularities. Two experiments investigate whether prosodic information provided by accented syllables located at the beginning and at the end of prosodic words is used by adult French learners to segment an artificial language. The results allow us to define a prosodic strategy of segmentation : (1) prominence in word final position is used to hypothesize final boundaries ; and (2) cues in word initial position can be used if and only if a primary final prominence is present.