Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study

The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with com- plement coercion. Complement coercion is a known linguistic phenomenon in which some verbs, semantically requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity- denoting complement, as in Mary began the book. The combination (i.e., event-selecting verb+entity-denoting noun) has been reported to involve type mismatch, and thus elic- its processing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-Euro- pean languages, such as English and German, it is debatable if the phenomenon exists in a typologically distinct language from English (e.g., in structural complexity of words), such as Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, the study conducted a self-paced read- ing experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the process- ing difficulty of complement coercion.