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 English pronoun system is undergoing a change in progress as singular they is used more frequently to refer to specific individuals, especially those who identify as nonbinary. How does this change affect the language production system? Research has shown that the production of he/she pronouns is supported by salient discourse status and inhibited in contexts where the pronoun would be ambiguous. In an analysis of naturally-occurring written texts, we test whether they production patterns with he/she production, controlling for discourse context. Results show that the overall rate of pronoun use is lower for references to nonbinary individuals than for references to binary individuals. This difference is not explained by the potential ambiguity of a referent in context. We speculate that relative unfamiliarity with nonbinary they and nonbinary gender may inhibit the activation of they during production, or may lead writers to avoid using a form that may not be familiar to their addressees.