Intersegmental cohesion and syllable division in Polish (Extended version)

An experiment with Polish participants was devised in order to shed light on ‘intersegmental cohesion hierarchy’, with special regard to CC intervocalic sequences. This hierarchy regulates the strength of the segments’ mutual attraction, obeying both universal and language-specific tendencies. The results show that Polish speakers, as contrasted to Italian ones, exhibit a finer cohesion scale due to the richer phonotactics to which they are attuned. In the authors’ approach, syllabic structure is assumed to emerge as an epiphenomenon from this hierarchy.