When is a cluster not a cluster?

Consonant clusters remain a continuing concern of acquisition research. A recent proposal from the domain of second language acquisition comes from Archibald (1998). He proposes an implicational universal, whereby the presence of consonant 1 liquid (C 1 L) clusters implies the presence of an underlying contrast between /l / and /r/. This is interesting, because it has never before been proposed that the contrasts in which a segment is involved may aŒect whether or not it may occur in a cluster. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an archival study designed to evaluate Archibald’s proposal for ® rst language acquisition. Archibald’s claim makes certain predictions about the liquids and the types of clusters that learners might produce. Speci ® cally, his hypothesis predicts that a learner may have one or no liquids in his/her phonemic inventory and not produce C 1 L clusters. It also predicts that a learner who has a liquid contrast may or may not produce such clusters. What one would not expect to ® nd is a learner who does not have a liquid contrast and yet produces C 1 L clusters. In order to test these predictions, an archival database containing data for 11