(Not in Clarifications and corrections
The Psychology of Language, 3rd Edition is a thorough revision and update of the popular second edition.
Correction to reference on page 47
Sanford, A. J. (1985). Cognition and cognitive psychology. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Correction to reference on page 281
Brownell, H. H., Michel, D., Powelson, J. A., & Gardner, H. (1983). Surprise but not coherence: Sensitivity to verbal humor in right hemisphere patients. Brain and Language, 18, 20-27.
Correction to image on page 227
The text displayed in the image is an excerpt from a Chinese menu; as such, the label of “Kanji” is largely inaccurate. The caption under the image should read: “Chinese (shown here) is a logographic or ideographic script, providing no information on word pronunciation.”
Chapter 12 Comprehension on page 375
Gender and pronoun resolution. The description of the experiment on the effects of gender and pronoun resolution needs clarification.
The experiment was more complex than I've portrayed it to be. The complicating factor in the Arnold et al. study is that they also manipulated order of mention, and this interacted with gender so that there was only evidence of an effect of gender for the less- accessible second-mentioned character. For the first-mentioned character, people looked quickly at the target no matter whether the gender was ambiguous or not.
Focussing just on the contrast between same and different-gender for the second mentioned character:
- Agnes beat Vlad in the competition. He was sad.
- Robert beat Vlad in the competition. He was sad.
If the visual cues (or the meaning) make it clear that the only sad one is Vlad, you have an initial bias to interpret "He" as referring to Robert, and you then have to revise very quickly when you get "sad".
In summary the importance of gender can only really be observed if you also understand what other information influences pronoun resolution, which seems to require a more complicated story.
I am grateful to Jennifer Arnold for discussion of this point.
Correction to reference on page 529
Harley, T.A. (1984). A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech errors. Cognitive Science, 8, 191-219.
Correction to reference on page 557
Roberson, D., Davies, I., & Davidoff, J. (2000). Color categories are not universal: Replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 369-398.