Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In recent years, the pronoun system of English has begun to accommodate gender diverse identities. The present study investigates how individuals process and adapt to two novel pronouns: nonbinary they and the neopronoun ze. Using a Web-based maze task, we compared processing of these pronouns relative to binary s/he pronouns. We also examined how reading behavior adapted to repeated exposure to each pronoun. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rarer ze elicited greater processing difficulty than singular they overall. However, participants adapted more quickly to ze than to they. We propose that ze may be more easily learned than singular they because it does not compete with plural they.