The English use of "they" to refer to a singular referent that is non-specific or of unknown gender dates back to the 1300s. Recently, "they" has emerged as the dominant pronoun for individuals who identify as gender nonbinary, and a coherent subset of English speakers (innovators) explicitly accept "they" when referring to a specific individual of known gender ((i) “Sarah slept because they were tired”) in off-line judgments. The present work examines whether on-line comprehension difficulty patterns with off-line judgments. Using a maze-task, participants' read sentences like (i) containing “they” with plural or singular subjects, or “he/she” with named subjects that matched or mismatched in their typical gender. Gender mismatched evoked reading difficulty. Plural “they” also caused difficulty, but significantly less. Innovators experienced less difficulty with singular “they” than non-innovators, but still processed plural “they” faster than singular “they”. This work suggests that the grammar of “they” may have yet to stabilize even for innovative speakers.

Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the strength and speed of access to lexical knowledge (e.g., our representation of the word dog in our mental vocabulary) and semantic knowledge (e.g., our knowledge that a dog is associated with a leash) via both spoken words (e.g., “dog”) and characteristic sounds (e.g., a dog’s bark). Results show that both spoken words and characteristic sounds activate lexical and semantic knowledge, but with different patterns. Spoken words activate lexical knowledge faster than characteristic sounds do, but with the same strength. In contrast, characteristic sounds access semantic knowledge stronger than spoken words do, but with the same speed. These findings reveal similarities and differences in the activation of conceptual knowledge by verbal and non-verbal means and advance our understanding of how auditory input is cognitively processed.