The article aims at the explanation of some distributional peculiarities of two high unrounded vowels [i] and [È] in Russian. More generally, it looks at some phonotactic constraints of Russian vowels which are directly related to a broader topic of palatalization and vowel reduction in this language. Although the discussion in this paper concerns only a tiny section of Russian phonology, which is the distribution of high unrounded vowels, it is necessary to introduce several facts from Russian phonology, such as palatalization, velarization, stress and vowel reduction. They, at first sight, may look pretty much irrelevant to the main topic of the paper but, as it will become evident, are closely related and actually indispensable to the understanding of vowel distribution including the two high unrounded vowels in Russian.

The subject of the article is the Italian influence on Croatian phonotactics. Selected issues concerning the distribution of consonants from the Čakavian dialect and na našu – the dialect of Croatian villages in Italy – are discussed in the article.

The paper approaches an important issue of the phonological similarity of words, relevant for current research in phonotactics, word recognition, production and acquisition, by analyzing the data collected in an experiment in which 30 native speakers of Polish were asked to provide phonologically similar words to 80 nonwords. The study demonstrates that the uncovered patterns of phonological similarity (segment substitutions, deletions and additions, the use of bigrams, trigrams and quadrigrams, noncontiguous sounds and segment metathesis) go beyond the commonly employed concept of neighbourhood density and point to the need to revise the current approaches to phonological similarity of words. It is argued that the experimental results can be attributed to the considerably more complex phonotactic and morphological structure of Polish than English.