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Abstract Speaking requires frequent decisions about how to refer, for example whether to use a pronoun (she) or a name (Ana). It is well known that this choice is guided by the discourse context, but little is known about the representations that are activated. We use priming to test whether this choice can be facilitated through recent exposure, and if so, what representations are activated. In a storytelling task, participants take turns with experimenters telling a story that is illustrated in 2-panel cartoons. The first sentence is given, and participants describe the second panel in their own words. We manipulate whether the experimenter used a pronoun or name in the prior story. Experiment 1 provides the first evidence in the literature that reference form choice can be primed, and that it is not dependent on the syntactic position of the antecedent. However, the effect is not finely tuned to the preceding prime. Instead, exposure at the start of the experiment persists throughout, even when the prime changes. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that exposure to pronoun primes result in greater pronoun use than at baseline, but that there is no sensitivity to the prime on the most recent trial. Results argue against a role for production facilitation in pronoun use, which suggests that reference production is not impacted by production efficiency. 

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. 

Evidence is accumulating that patterns of use for singular “they” are changing in English. The pronoun is becoming the preferred generic when the gender of the referent is unknown or backgrounded. This change reflects a shift in patterns of acceptability for uses of singular “they” which is in turn linked to the increased frequency of singular they. We predict that adaptation may be a cognitive mechanism underlying this change, and if so, we may see short-term adaptation within a lab session. In the present study, we use a between-subjects priming paradigm to test whether participants adapt to the frequency with which they encounter singular or plural senses of “they” in the local discourse. We find that selections of singular “they” are significantly more likely after participants have been exposed to unambiguously singular vs. plural uses of “they”. This finding implicates adaptation and suggests that adaptation may link changes in the frequency of linguistic forms to changes in their acceptability. 

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.  

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.