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 coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion.

本研究旨在探讨补语强制的汉语普通话句子的加工模式。补语强制是一种已知的语言现象，其中一些动词，语义上需要一个表示事件的补语，与一个表示实体的补语相结合，就像玛丽开始这本书一样. 据报道，组合（即事件选择动词 + 实体表示名词）涉及类型不匹配，从而导致处理困难。虽然这种现象已在印欧语言（如英语和德语）中得到广泛研究，但这种现象是否存在于与英语（例如，单词的结构复杂性）不同的语言（如普通话）中是有争议的。为了提供实证证据，该研究进行了自定进度阅读实验，以比较普通话中胁迫句和非胁迫控制的加工模式。结果显示，强制句子的阅读时间比非强制句子长，这支持了先前关于补语强制处理难度的发现。