Supporting material for Arnold, Venkatesh & Vig (2024)
Arnold, J. E., Venkatesh, R., & Vig, Z. (in press). Gender Competition in the Production of Nonbinary ‘They’. Glossa Psycholinguistics.
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 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.
Partically funded by NSF grant 1917840 to J. Arnold. Thank you to A’sjei Scott for help with running subjects, coding, and analysis. Thank you to Nicholas Payst, Eri Kakoki and Avery Wall for their help with the prosodic analyses.
This work was presented at the HSP 2022 conference as a brief talk (aka poster):
Arnold, J. E., Venkatesh, R., & Vig, Z. (2022). University students produce nonbinary singular “they” almost as well as “he” or “she”. Poster, Human Sentence Processing conference, Santa Cruz, CA (virtual).
Data and stimuli available at: https://osf.io/c2j65/
VISUAL STIMULI
Many thanks to Darith Klibanow and Eri Kakoki for creating the faces of the characters in our stimuli!
Darith Klibanow drew the faces of Liz, Will, and Alex and they are copyrighted to Jennifer Arnold (2020); see also Arnold, Mayo, & Dong (2021). Eri Kakoki drew the faces of Ana and Matt and they are copyrighted to Jennifer Arnold (2022). The full-figure pictures for the current study were created by Zachary Vig and Ranjani Venkatesh and are copyrighted to Jennifer Arnold (2022).
