Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The only combination that I could not find is one containing more than two adjacent sonorants. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Any of the pairs above can combine in longer sequences, in any order. For instance, /pl/ is considered to be less marked than /bl/ since the former has larger sonority. According to this principle, the marked bi-consonantal sequences are such that the sonority distance between the first consonant and the subsequent consonant is relatively small. Language universals are not mentally representedthey are only statistical tendencies, shaped by generic (auditory and motor) constraints on language. modification is often correlated with sonority-based markedness. Rather, speakers simply know regularities (either structural or statistical) concerning words in their own language. A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif → lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. The alternative denies that speakers have knowledge of language universals. Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif–lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif–lbif). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd > lb). Modern Hebrew is an example of such language.Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Some languages allow a sonority "plateau" that is, two adjacent tautosyllabic consonants with the same sonority level. Some languages possess syllables that violate the SSP ( Russian and English, for example) while other languages strictly adhere to it, even requiring larger intervals on the sonority scale: In Attic Greek for example, a syllable-initial stop must be followed by either a liquid, a glide or a vowel, but not by a fricative. The sonority values of segments are determined by a sonority hierarchy.Ī good example for the SSP in English is the one-syllable word "trust": The first consonant in the syllable onset is t, which is a stop, the lowest on the sonority scale next is r, a liquid which is more sonorous, then we have the vowel u (IPA: ʌ) - the sonority peak next, in the syllable coda, is s, a fricative, and last is another stop, t. In any syllable, the center of the syllable, namely the syllable nucleus, or the vowel, constitutes a sonority peak that is preceded and/or followed by a sequence of segments- consonants-with progressively decreasing sonority values (i.e., the sonority has to fall toward both edges of the syllable). of articulation is significant within sonority falls and plateaux (p<.01) in falls there. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) is a phonotactic principle that aims to outline the structure of a syllable in terms of sonority. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article does not cite any references or sources.