The potential source of the processing difficulty of complement coercion: A self-paced reading study in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates the potential source of the processing difficulty elicited from complement coercion. Complement coercion involves repairing a semantic type mismatch between an event-selecting verb and an entity-denoting complement (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1991). This phenomenon is found in sentences such as Mary started a book. It has been reported that the entity object elicited processing cost following the verbs that require an event argument, compared with the verbs that do not (e.g., Mary read a book). The processing cost was attributed either to the coercion-based semantic enrichment (i.e., coercing the entity object into an event sense) (Traxler et al., 2002), or simply to the lower predictability (thus, high surprisal) of the entity object preceded by an event-selecting verb (Delogu et al., 2017).