Who is [not] expected to use singular them? Evidence from real-time language processing

This article presents the results of an experiment that investigates how knowledge of a speaker’s beliefs modulates people’s expectations of linguistic choices that person would make, specifically the use of the gender-neutral pronoun them to refer to a known and specific entity. As the use of gender-neutral pronouns is associated with more gender-progressive individuals, it was hypothesized that the use of them would be more surprising if coming from someone more conservative and that this expectation would manifest in real-time processing. The experiment is a self-paced reading task in which participants read sentences from a fictitious “speaker” using a gender-marked ( him/her ) or gender neutral ( them ) pronoun to refer to different types of nouns: those that mark gender definitionally (e.g., saleswoman), those that mark gender stereotypically (e.g., plumber), and those that do not have any strong gender associations (e.g., pedestrian). The results provide evidence that a speaker’s ideological beliefs do influence real-time processing of their utterances: participants demonstrated a processing advantage when a progressive speaker used gender-neutral them following a neutral noun antecedent compared to the same usage from a conservative speaker. Results are discussed in the context of past work on social meaning and speaker-specific language processing effects.