ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first study devoted to Polish native speakers’ phonotactic intuitions concerning the well-formedness of nonwords with two-consonant clusters. Using a five-point scale, 50 Polish students were requested to make acceptability judgements of 80 monosyllabic nonwords with either initial or final sequences of double consonants which follow the phonotactic restrictions of Polish. The experimental results were next examined from the perspective of three possible determinants of the participants’ acceptability judgements: the sonority profile of the clusters measured in terms of the Sonority Sequencing Generalization (Selkirk 1982) and Net Auditory Distance (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2009, 2014), as well as corpus frequency of the examined sequences. It is demonstrated that while all these factors appear to affect the obtained results (with cluster frequency being the best predictor of the participants’ nonword acceptability decisions), other possible determinants of this phenomenon have to be studied as well.
