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Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study
1Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Q78, B7704, Blue Zone, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, 83, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. xuewentingxwt@outlook.com.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|November 18, 2020
Summary
Complement coercion, where verbs requiring events pair with entities, causes processing difficulty in Mandarin Chinese. This study confirms this linguistic phenomenon exists in Mandarin, similar to English.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Complement coercion involves type mismatch between event-selecting verbs and entity-denoting noun complements.
- This phenomenon is well-documented in Indo-European languages like English and German.
- Its existence in typologically distinct languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, remains debated.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the processing patterns of complement coercion in Mandarin Chinese.
- To determine if Mandarin sentences with complement coercion elicit processing difficulties.
- To compare coercion and non-coercion sentence processing in Mandarin.
Main Methods:
- A self-paced reading experiment was conducted.
- Participants read sentences involving complement coercion and control sentences.
- Reading times for critical sentence regions were analyzed.
Main Results:
- Sentences with complement coercion were read significantly slower than non-coercion control sentences.
- This indicates increased processing difficulty for coercion sentences in Mandarin.
- Findings align with previous research on complement coercion in other languages.
Conclusions:
- Complement coercion poses a processing challenge in Mandarin Chinese.
- The study provides empirical evidence for this linguistic phenomenon in Mandarin.
- This supports the universality of certain psycholinguistic processing mechanisms across languages.
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