In two experiments, French speakers detected cv or cvc sequences at the beginning of disyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. Overall, both studies failed to replicate the crossover interaction that has been previously observed in French by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Seguí (1981). In both experiments, latencies were shorter to cv than to cvc targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for cvc . cv than for cv . cv carriers. However, a clear crossover interaction was observed for liquid pivotal consonants under target-blocking conditions, and especially for slow participants. A third experiment collected phoneme- gating data on the same pseudowords to obtain estimates of the duration of the initial phonemes. Regression analyses showed that phoneme duration accounted for a large proportion of the variance for cvc target detection, suggesting that participants were reacting rather directly to phonemic throughput. These Žndings argue against the hypothesis of an early syllabic classiŽcation mechanism in the perception of speech.