Language and Gender |

How do representations of gender guide language comprehension? Gender has obvious implications for English third-person pronouns.

Comprehension of “she” and “he”: eyetracking studies demonstrate that adults and children use gender marking rapidly to interpret the third-person pronouns “he” and “she”.

Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J. G., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: Evidence of the time course for pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition, 76(1), B13-B26.

Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., Trueswell, J., & Fagnano, M. (2005). Children’s use of gender and order of mention during pronoun comprehension. In Trueswell, J. C. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (Eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions. Boston, MA: MIT Press, pp. 261-281.

Arnold, J. E., Novick, J. M., Brown-Schmidt, S., Eisenband, J. G., & Trueswell, J. C. (2001). Knowing the Difference Between Girls and Boys: The Use of Gender During On-Line Pronoun Comprehension in Young Children. In A. J. Do, L. Domínguez, A. Johansen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development , Vols 1 and 2 (pp. 59-69). Somerville, MA US: Cascadilla Press.

Comprehension and production of singular “they”

Arnold, J. E., Mayo, H., & Dong, L. (2021). My pronouns are they/them: Talking about pronouns promotes singular they. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01905-0

Arnold, J. E., Marquez, A., Li, J., & Franck, G. (in press). Does nonbinary they inherit the binary pronoun production system? Glossa: Psycholinguistics.