This paper aims to show, from the description and analysis of unconventional segmentations of words in texts, the relevance of the syllabic trochee in the insertion of space within the limits of the word (hypersegmentation) or in the removal of space between word boundaries (hyposegmentation), as well as its relationship with the linguistic rhythm of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP). The data analyzed in this study were drawn from texts produced spontaneously by children in the writing acquisition process in Brazil and Portugal. The analyses, based on the Bisol's proposal (2000), point to the fact that unconventional segmentations of words, both in BP and in EP, show similar results regarding the relevance of the syllabic trochee as an important motivator of hyper and hyposegmentations. The main difference between these two varieties of Portuguese is related to evidence of linguistic rhythm in the written language, due to the directionality with which the clitic associates itself to a content word: proclitic in BP and enclitic in EP. That analysis, particularly, is based on Abaurre and Galves (1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]