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

xlomafota.13 shared this article with you from Inoreader Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study Via Latest Results for Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Abstract The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with complement 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 elicits processing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-European 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 reading experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coerc ion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion. View on the web Inoreader. Take back control of your news feed. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.