One phonotactic restriction for speaking, listening and reading The case of the no geminate constraint in German

This article illustrates the cross-modal application of the phonotactic no geminate constraint that disallows geminate consonants within a prosodic word in German. In phonological production, forms like |hat+tə| ‘have-3SG.PST’ surface as /hatə/ (instead of */hatːə/) due to this constraint. In speech perception, phonetic forms with geminates like [bʁoːtːaɪk] ‘bread dough’ are perceived as consisting of two prosodic words because of this constraint. And in the reading process, orthographic forms with double consonantal graphemes like <Wall> and <Teller> are read as /wal/ and /tɛlɐ/, not */walː/ and */tɛlːɐ/ due to this constraint. I show that this observation can be formalized in Optimality Theory by applying the same phonotactic constraint in phonological production, in the perception grammar (Boersma 2007) and in the reading grammar (Hamann & Colombo 2017). In both the perception and the reading grammar, this constraint interacts with constraints that handle the arbitrary mapping between the sensory input (auditory or written) and a surface phonological form. This approach is shown to be preferable to previous analyses of reading double consonantal graphemes in German, which either lack an explicit formalization of the phonological knowledge or reduplicate this in their phoneme-to-grapheme mappings.