An experiment with Polish participants was devised in order to shed light on ‘intersegmental cohesion hierarchy’, with special regard to CC 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 approach advocated by the authors, syllabic structure is assumed to epiphenomenically emerge from the given hierarchy.