The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-“deaf” for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

The goal of this paper is to discuss phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in two different languages, German and Polish, and to establish a general procedure for a rank-ordering of clusters. The description of clusters is based on corpus and dictionary data. We define several dimensions in cluster description, namely (i) complexity of clusters, (ii) place of articulation, (iii) manner of articulation and (iv) voicing of segments, for which a total of 15 parameters is derived, each expressing a structural preference for cluster formation true to various degrees in the two languages. These preferences can be seen in part as extensions of the frequently used measure of sonority based mainly on manner of articulation features, and can be considered to provide a more detailed description of clusters than one based on sonority. In addition, a cluster analysis for the two sets of clusters lends support to the conclusions on the fundamental difference between Polish and German word-initial phonotactics. For each cluster, values obtained for every parameter are summed up to calculate an empirically justified rank ordering of the clusters in both languages.

The paper reports the results of a learnability experiment with German speakers, investigating the role of universal phonotactic constraints and language use in language processing. Making use of an artificial language paradigm, participants learned nonce words with existent and non-existent German final consonant clusters adhering to or violating sonority sequencing principles postulated for consonant clusters. Behavioural data and event-related brain potentials in response to these cluster properties were obtained twice, before and after learning word-picture-pairs. The results show (1) that learning and processing of final consonant clusters is facilitated by adherence to the sonority hierarchy, and (2) that actual existence of well- and ill-formed consonant clusters aids processing mechanisms. Thus, both implicit knowledge of universal phonotactic principles and frequency-based factors are demonstrated to play a role in the online-processing of words

Phonological knowledge of a language involves knowledge about which segments can be combined under what conditions. Languages vary in the quantity and quality of licensed combinations, in particular sequences of consonants, with Polish being a language with a large inventory of such combinations. The present paper reports on a two-session experiment in which Polish-speaking adult participants learned nonce words with final consonant clusters. The aim was to study the role of two factors which potentially play a role in the learning of phonotactic structures: the phonological principle of sonority (ordering sound segments within the syllable according to their inherent loudness) and the (non-) existence as a usage-based phenomenon. EEG responses in two different time windows (adversely to behavioral responses) show linguistic processing by native speakers of Polish to be sensitive to both distinctions, in spite of the fact that Polish is rich in sonority-violating clusters. In particular, a general learning effect in terms of an N400 effect was found which was demonstrated to be different for sonority-obeying clusters than for sonority-violating clusters. Furthermore, significant interactions of formedness and session, and of existence and session, demonstrate that both factors, the sonority principle and the frequency pattern, play a role in the learning process.

The objective of this contribution is to provide an analysis of consonant clusters based on the assumption that phonotactic preferences are encoded in phonological features of individual segments forming a cluster. This encoding is expressed by a set of parameters established for the following features: complexity, place of articulation, manner of articulation and voicing. On the basis of empirically observed tendencies of feature distribution and co-occurrence, novel phonotactic preferences for English word-initial consonant clusters are proposed. Statistical methods allow us to weigh the preferences and determine a ranking of phonological features in cluster formation.