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Two experiments test how college students use nonbinary they to refer to a single and specific person whose pronouns are they/them, e.g., “Alex played basketball on the neighborhood court. At one point they made a basket,” compared to matched stories about characters with binary (she/her or he/him) pronouns. Experiment 1 shows that for both types of pronouns, people use pronouns more in a one-person than a two-person context. In both experiments, people produce nonbinary they at least as frequently as binary pronouns, suggesting that any difficulty does not result in pronoun avoidance in spoken language, even though it does in written language (Arnold et al., 2022). Nevertheless, there is evidence that nonbinary they is somewhat difficult, in that people made gender errors on about 9% of trials, and they used a more acoustically prominent and disfluent-sounding pronunciation for nonbinary pronouns than binary pronouns. However, exposure  to  they  in  the  context  of  the  experiment  had  no  effect  on  frequency,  accuracy,  or  pronunciation of pronouns. This provides the first evidence of how nonbinary they is used in a naturalistic storytelling context and shows that while it poses some minor difficulties, it can be used successfully in a supportive context.  

In three experiments, we measured individual patterns of pronoun comprehension (Experiments 1 and 2) and referential prediction (Experiment 3) in implicit causality (IC) contexts and compared these with a measure of participants’ print exposure (Author Recognition Task; ART). Across all three experiments, we found that ART interacted with verb bias, such that participants with higher scores demonstrated a stronger semantic bias, i.e., they tended to select the pronoun or predict the re-mention of the character that was congruent with an implicit cause interpretation. This suggests that print exposure changes the way language is processed at the discourse level, and in particular, that it is related to implicit cause sensitivity. 

Abstract It is well established that people adapt to statistical regularities at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. Much less is known about adaptation to discourse‐level structures, such as adaptation to structures defined as the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent. To fill this gap, this paper reviews studies on the learning of referential patterns by asking (1) do people represent referential structures, (2) how long do discourse‐level representations last, (3) how specific are representations that are used for referential adaptation, (4) what mechanisms underlie this adaptation, and (5) what the current methods are used to test referential adaptation. This paper also briefly summarises the work on adaptation at other linguistic levels. This line of work extends adaptation to higher‐level structures and demonstrates how people learn language patterns that drive successful communication and reading skills. 

The pronoun “they” can be either plural or singular, perhaps referring to an individual who identifies as nonbinary. How do listeners identifywhether “they” has a singular or plural sense? We test the role of explicitly discussing pronouns (e.g., “Alex uses they/them pronouns”). In three experiments, participants read short stories, like “Alex went running with Liz. They fell down.” Answers to “Who fell down” indicated whether participants interpreted they as Alex or Alex-and-Liz. We found more singular responses in discourse contexts that make Alex more available: when Alex was either the only person in the context or mentioned first. Critically, the singular interpretation was stronger when participants heard explicit instructions that Alex uses they/them pronouns, even though participants in all conditions had ample opportunity to learn this fact through observation. Results show that the social trend to talk about pronouns has a direct impact on how language is understood.