1 Introduction

English includes several personal pronouns to refer to humans, including she, he, and they. While they is often plural, it also has been used in the singular for centuries, for example “Every student does their homework” (Balhorn 2004; Baron 2020). Recently singular they has also emerged as a socially significant form for referring to individuals who take they as their personal pronoun, often people who identify as gender nonbinary. For example, an article on Demi Lovato reports “‘I’ve had the revelation that I identify as non-binary,’ they said ….” (Olson & Fuentes 2022). People vary in the degree to which they accept singular they in different linguistic contexts (Bradley et al. 2019; Camilliere et al. 2021; Conrod 2019; 2022; Conrod, Schultz & Ahn 2022; Konnelly & Cowper 2020). This raises questions about how singular they is cognitively represented and used.

In this squib I propose that it is theoretically and empirically useful to distinguish between two broad classes of singular they: “Underspecified singular they”, which is unrelated to the referent’s personal pronouns, and “Personal singular they”, used when the referent’s personal pronouns are they/them. This proposal makes three innovative contributions while building on current evidence. First, it fills a gap in current theoretical accounts by distinguishing between uses with different discourse and processing conditions. Second, it highlights the importance of the discourse representation in determining the appropriateness of both kinds of singular they. Third, it highlights the distinction between Personal and Underspecified uses of definite specific they.

2 Underspecified singular they

Part of this proposal is that it is worth grouping together multiple uses of singular they under the umbrella term “underspecified singular they”. This is the “old” form, often defined as the use of singular they for a person whose gender is either not known or not important. The most widely accepted uses of singular they are with quantified antecedents (e.g., Everyone should make their bed), or epicene referents (those with unknown gender, e.g., A teacher should know their students; The clerk had their back to me). But some speakers also accept they with known referents, e.g. My neighbor said they would stop by (Bjorkman 2017; Konnelly & Cowper 2020). While these uses differ from each other in some ways, I argue that they share processing features that distinguish them from Personal they.

What are the conditions supporting underspecified singular they? Some scholars suggest it is defined by the absence of a need to mark gender on the pronoun (e.g., Haegeman 1981, as cited by Bjorkman 2017). This explains its use when the gender is not known because it is distributed (everyone, anyone), indefinite and not specified (a teacher), or known but not important to the story (my neighbor). In some cases they may be used to hide person’s identity for privacy.

Consistent with this idea, empirical evidence suggests that they is less common when the gender is salient or assumed. Camilliere et al. (2021) collected acceptance ratings for singular they in a variety of contexts, for example My dentist… they or My friend…they. The sentences were out of context and referred to unknown people, so the only information about gender came from assumptions based on the linguistic labels. They found that they was rated as less acceptable for antecedents with an assumed gender (My sister; Sophia) compared with antecedents that were not gender-biased (My friend, Taylor). A similar picture emerges from comprehension studies; people rate singular they as more natural if the referent does not have a strong stereotypical gender than if it does (Doherty & Conklin 2017), and read it just as quickly as he or she for gender-neutral antecedents (Foertsch & Gernsbacher 1997).

This evidence might suggest that singular they simply represents an ungendered pronoun. If so, we could follow a nice, neat, rule for choosing pronouns: she for feminine, he for masculine, and they for ungendered/neutral. But other evidence shows that things are not this simple.

First, numerous examples show that they is often used for gendered antecedents (Bjorkman, 2017; Newman, 1998); see also Table 1. Second, there appear to be additional pragmatic constraints that determine whether they is used instead of he or she. In particular, the pragmatic conditions for using they are constrained to contexts where the referent is not representationally detailed. Newman (1992) suggests that singular they is biased toward “nonsolid” antecedents, where solidity is defined as the “existence or not of a specific concrete referent.” Newman (1998)’s “individuation” measure contrasts “referents treated as individuals with their identity relevant” and generic referents. A related concept is Camilliere et al.’s (2021) manipulation of what they call “social distance”, also called “distal they” by Conrod (2019). Camilliere et al. found that they is accepted more for referents that are socially “far” from the speaker, e.g. for the dentist more than my friend, and the actress more than my sister. Social distance/distal they are described in terms of the social relation in the real world, suggesting that it is important to be more detailed about the people we know personally.

Table 1: Examples of singular they with a gendered referent.

Antecedent type Example
Quantified “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend” (Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, 1623).
Indefinite “a single mother and their three children” (spoken by a landlord interviewed by John Oliver, June 29, 2020).
Definite Me: My son will swing by to pick up my order.
Store clerk: “just have them call us when they are here so we can bring it out.” (phone conversation, July 2020).

Building on these observations, I suggest that the key criterion for selecting Underspecified singular they is discourse specificity. Singular they is preferred when the speaker intends to evoke an underspecified mental representation for the addressee in the discourse. By contrast, a specific personal pronoun (e.g., she) is preferred when the referent representation is highly developed. This property is defined in terms of the treatment of the referent within the discourse. If I’m talking about my neighbor in passing, their identity is not important, which is signaled by singular they. But if I want to build a detailed picture of my neighbor’s personal qualities, I might say she. Audience knowledge also likely matters; anecdotally people use they to refer to a friend who uses he or she pronouns more often when the addressee doesn’t know the friend.

This criterion differs from some previous suggestions because it focuses on variation in the mental representation of the referent as portrayed in the discourse (extending Newman’s (1998) concept of individuation) and not the real-world relationship between the speaker and referent (cf. Camilliere et al. 2021; Conrod 2019). At the same time, real-world relationships are expected to correlate, such that speakers likely provide more elaborated descriptions of close friends than acquaintances.

This proposal also breaks with previous accounts (Konnelly & Conrod & Bradley 2023) by lumping definite specific referents (e.g., my neighbor…they) with generic and quantified referents in the underspecified category. Even though definite specific cases are less accepted than epicene uses of they, they also highlight the role of discourse specificity. On the proposed account, it’s not the lexical item that determines acceptability of they but rather the discourse context and how elaborated the referent is. This predicts that acceptability is modulated by specificity within a particular discourse context, on top of individual variation in overall willingness to accept the form.

The idea of discourse specification also breaks with the common assumption that singular they is driven by the lack of a salient gender.1 While gender matters too, two examples suggest that discourse specification may be stronger than gender. First, Camilliere et al. (2021)’s social distance effect reveals that referential properties affect acceptability over and above definiteness and gender. Similarly, Moulton et al. (2020) found that people accepted the use of singular they equally well whether the hearer knew the referent’s gender or not. Second, the examples in Table 1 show that they can be used for gender-specific antecedents. Hypothetically, the role of discourse specification may have developed because it co-occurs with gender uncertainty. Epicene and quantified contexts are almost always contexts where the details of the person’s identity are unspecified. Over time, the discourse conditions that trigger singular they may have shifted from “lack of gender” to “lack of representational detail”.

Unlike social distance or solidity, the concept of discourse underspecification predicts that they co-varies with other pronouns dynamically within and across discourses. Thus, I may know my neighbor well, but use they if she plays only a passing role in a story I am telling. Indeed, I once observed my friend tell a story about a student; at the beginning of the story the student was they, and then as the story progressed and more details about the student emerged, the speaker shifted to she.

The discourse specificity proposal highlights two open questions for future research. First, singular they is used in contexts that are relatively underspecified, but individuals vary in their acceptance of singular they (Camilliere et al., 2021; Conrod 2019; Conrod et al., 2022). If underspecification is the driving criterion, it focuses predictions on identifying how the threshold for they varies across situations and individuals. Second, it raises questions about whether gender is an independent constraint or not. It may be hard to distinguish between gender representation and discourse specificity as the key determinant because they are likely to be correlated. If I don’t know the gender (anyone, a child, the person who called and didn’t leave a message), I also probably don’t know enough to construct a detailed mental representation. An open question is whether gender specificity is as an independent constraint from discourse specificity. The importance of gender underspecification as a selectional constraint likely varies across individuals and may be diminishing over time.

3 Personal singular they

A newer usage of singular they has emerged in the last decade or so as some people have adopted they as their personal pronoun, frequently people with nontraditional gender identities (see also Konnelly et al., 2023). This movement highlights the view that pronoun use is a matter of personal identity and has spurred the social practice of introducing pronouns in some communities. This has led to increased mainstream awareness that politeness requires learning and using someone’s personal pronoun, rather than assuming it. We term this usage “Personal they”, defined as the usage of they specifically because the referent’s personal pronouns are they/them.2

Personal they is critically different from both underspecified they and binary pronouns (she and he) in that the pragmatic conditions for using it are a linguistic fact — knowing that someone’s personal pronouns are they/them. This is a separate fact from gender identity, because some people identify as gender-queer3 but use other pronouns (e.g., neopronouns, hybrid pronouns like she/they, or binary pronouns), and some people use they as a personal pronoun without identifying as nonbinary (Sanders, 2019). Nevertheless, this usage still implicitly acknowledges the relevance of gender fluidity due to its association with nonbinary gender identity.

Thus, the pragmatic condition for using personal they is knowing that the referent’s personal pronouns are they/them. That means you have to know enough about the person to know what their pronouns are, so unlike underspecified they, it requires a mental representation that is specific enough to include knowledge of their pronouns. Using personal they also requires remembering a person’s pronouns (Gardner, 2023). Communication is facilitated when the referent’s pronouns are in common ground, so it is not uncommon to see written articles explicitly introduce pronouns,4 although some writers use personal they in passing.5 While the criterion is narrowly focused on knowing the personal pronouns, this detail tends to co-occur with other information about the referent. Indeed, using they/them pronouns probabilistically co-occurs with holding a nonbinary gender identity, to the extent that mis-using “he” for someone with they/them pronouns is termed an instance of misgendering (Conrod 2020). In sum, Personal they probabilistically co-occurs with referents that have highly specific discourse representations.

There is also significant individual variation in acceptance and ease of using personal they. It is a new form and is only relevant within communities where there are individuals who use it as a personal pronoun and share this information publicly. Arnold et al. (under review; see also Arnold et al. 2026) found that people who conceptualize gender as fluid and not linked to biological sex tended to be more accepting and more accurate at using personal they than those who view gender as fixed and binary. Both fluidity of gender concepts and linguistic facility were also correlated with increased exposure to personal they. This suggests a usage-based mechanism for acquiring personal singular they: people get better at it when it’s conceptually and communicatively relevant. Some people reject the use of personal they for ideological reasons (Hillard, 2019); they likely also avoid participation in communities where they might gain exposure to the linguistic form.

4 How are Personal and Underspecified they different?

4.1 Different pragmatic conditions

As described above, personal and underspecified singular they require nearly the opposite pragmatic conditions for usage. Personal they requires knowing someone’s personal pronouns, so at least this representational detail should be in common ground, and probably other specific information as well. By contrast, underspecified singular they primarily occurs when the mental representation is underspecified. Thus, the two uses may be homophones (words with different meanings) or two senses of a polysemous word.

From a production processing standpoint, the speaker starts with a mental representation of the referent, and then selects an appropriate referring expression (Dell 1986); see Arnold et al. (2024) for a processing model applied to the production of personal they. For personal they, this representation must include the specific knowledge that they is an acceptable pronoun, and its use may be supported in conditions where she or he would be impolite (Conrod 2020). For underspecified they, the selection is activated probabilistically, supported by holding an underspecified representation and perhaps strengthened by factors like having an unspecified gender. Thus, the constraints on selecting Personal and Underspecified they are different: one is selected when they is the referent’s personal pronoun; the other is selected when the referent has an underspecified discourse representation. These constraints are inversely correlated, such that the contexts supporting Personal they are often inconsistent with Underspecified they.

4.2 Old vs. New

Underspecified singular they has been attested as far back as middle English (Balhorn, 2004), although its acceptability has changed over time and young speakers today appear to accept it in a wider range of contexts than older speakers (Bjorkman 2017; Conrod 2019; Conrod et al., 2022; Camilliere et al., 2021; Konnelly & Cowper, 2020). By contrast, personal they is new, at least within the mainstream. Arnold et al. (under review) found that most of their participants had first heard of it in 2018 or later. When Arnold et al. (2022) searched for articles about real and fictional people who use they, they found articles mostly published in 2018 or later.6)

4.3 Easy vs. Hard

Not surprisingly, people also find the older form easier to use than the newer one. Anecdotally, people frequently tell me that they struggle to use personal they. Experimental studies show that understanding personal they is somewhat difficult. Arnold, Mayo and Dong (2021) tested the interpretation of they in a story context about three cartoon characters: Alex (they/them); Will (he/him), and Liz (she/her). Participants were asked to read stories like Alex made breakfast with Will. They broke some plates and answer the question “who broke some plates?” by selecting from either a picture of Alex alone (singular) or Alex and Will together (plural). This presents an ambiguity, since they could refer to either Alex alone or both Alex and Will. Participants selected the plural more than the singular interpretation, showing that the plural is still dominant. But introducing pronouns explicitly increased the chance that people interpreted they as Alex.

Using personal they in production is also somewhat difficult. Arnold et al. (2022) found that writers tended to under-use personal they compared with he and she, perhaps because the form is less familiar. In a spoken storytelling task, college students did not suppress the use of personal they, but they did make misgendering errors about 9% of the time (Arnold et al., 2024)

By contrast, experimental work with underspecified singular they suggests that it may be easy to understand in appropriate contexts. Reading singular they is facilitated by having a referent that is ungendered (e.g., “a runner”; Foertsch & Gernsbacher 1997) and they is judged more natural for referents without a stereotypical gender (e.g., “the cyclist” as opposed to “the mechanic”, Doherty & Conklin, 2017). On the other hand, reading can be impaired if the referent of they has an implied gender (“Lillian”; Leventhal, 2018; Leventhal et al. 2020; Prasad & Morris 2020), and even with an ungendered referent (e.g. “someone”) people can have trouble with singular they (Sanford & Filik 2007).

However, psycholinguistic work on underspecified singular they generally does not provide a social context apart from the linguistic text. Many studies use names as antecedents, and names are most commonly used in contexts where the speaker and addressee know at least something about the person’s identity, thus making underspecified they less appropriate in a decontextualized situation. Thus, evidence of difficulty may reflect the pragmatic infelicity of the context.

4.4 The social salience of Personal they

Personal they has social implications that underspecified they does not because its use requires recognizing the referent’s personal pronouns. As Conrod (2020) points out, using someone’s personal pronouns correctly is a matter of politeness. Misgendering can have negative effects on the mental health of transgender and nonbinary individuals (Sevelius et al. 2020), yet some writers are ideologically opposed to it (Hillard 2019). Yet awareness of the social implications of personal they varies across individuals.

5 How are personal and underspecified singular they similar?

Despite all their differences, personal and underspecified singular they are also similar in that they share a phonological form (they) and the ungendered morphosyntactic feature. Two recent grammatical accounts (Bjorkman 2017; Konnelly & Cowper 2020) aim to explain how people vary in their acceptability of singular they in terms of grammatical change. Here we focus on Konnelly & Cowper’s account, which builds on Bjorkman (2017). They suggest there are three categories of grammar that explain the set of antecedents that can grammatically co-occur with singular they. Pronouns carry morphosyntactic features; for example the pronoun they has the feature [animate] but lacks the features [masculine] and [feminine], so it is used as a default in cases where the referent is animate but not masculine or feminine.

On their account, in the Stage 1 grammar these features are fully contrastive and obligatory. Critically, at this stage words automatically acquire a contrastive gender feature if you know the referent’s gender. So a child has the feature [female] when it refers to a known girl but not to an unknown person. This means that singular they can only be used for quantified referents or when the referent has a gender that is unknown or epicene. At Stage 2, gender features are still contrastive, but the gender feature is marked variably across lexical items. That means that some nouns like a friend can be unmarked for gender and occur as the antecedent of they. At the “super-innovative” Stage 3, they can refer to any referent, including gendered nouns like my sister. They suggest that this occurs by a shift in the system such that gender features on the nouns themselves are entirely underspecified.

Thus, under their view there is no grammatical distinction between using they in the personal and underspecified senses, because both are captured by the absence of gender marking on the noun. The only difference occurs at stage 2, where some (but not all) nouns may be ungendered. That means that using they for a nonbinary friend requires the speaker to add an ad-hoc new lexical entry for their name, e.g. “Mary-ungendered”, as opposed to “Mary-gendered” for other Marys. At stage 3 this distinction goes away because all gender marking is underspecified.

In sum, this grammatical account focuses on the linguistic properties of antecedents to explain when singular they is accepted and how people differ in their patterns of acceptance. The authors acknowledge that using they for a nonbinary individual is a specific case (see also Konnelly et al. 2023), but the grammatical features of underspecified and personal they are not different.

6 Theoretical implications: why do we need two kinds of singular they?

Distinguishing underspecified and personal they is theoretically beneficial because 1) it can explain a range of existing data, and 2) it raises useful questions for future research.

6.1 Existing Data

The two-kinds account builds on prior work but extends it by centering the role of pragmatic constraints. Grammatical accounts (Bjorkman 2017; Konnelly & Cowper 2020) do a good job of accounting for systematic differences in patterns of acceptability. Konnelly and Cowper’s 3-stage model is supported by rating data (Camilliere et al. 2021), which clustered into three groups. Grammatical accounts focus on the presence or absence of a contrastive gender feature, which accounts for evidence that gender guides acceptability to some extent.

On the other hand, this approach does not account for the differences between these forms identified above. Perhaps the most striking difference comes from reported difficulty. People have trouble with personal they, and they make mistakes using it (e.g., Arnold et al. 2024). But people frequently produce Underspecified they in a variety of contexts, suggesting that it is fully established as a part of people’s grammatical repertoire.

The two-kinds approach suggests a new reason for why people have difficulty with personal they. Writers try to explain their discomfort with singular they by suggesting that it’s simply ungrammatical. Yet we know that can’t be true given how widespread it is. Some writers also complain that singular they is too ambiguous, yet he and she also present substantial ambiguity that comprehenders must resolve via contextual biases. The current proposal suggests that the difficulty stems instead from a pragmatic mismatch. For many people, singular they is restricted to cases where the referent is not known or identified. This constraint conflicts with discourses like “Asia Kate Dillon (born November 15, 1984) is an American actor. They are known for their roles as…” (Wikipedia, Asia Kate Dillon, retrieved May 27, 2025) where they refers to a specific person with a well-developed discourse description.

The idea that underspecified they is specific to underspecified referents also unifies a range of proposals that singular they is used for “socially far” (Camilliere et al. 2020), “distal” (Conrod 2019), “nonsolid” (Newman 1992) or “individuated (Newman 1998) referents. It provides a single explanation for both classic examples of singular they with quantified or indefinite referents and also cases where the referent is specific and definite but not central to the discourse. It is also consistent with the observation that they often feels appropriate even if the gender is known but the specific person is not.

6.2 Open questions

The two-kinds proposal also identifies new questions for future work. First, are underspecified and personal they are similar or different? It predicts that from a processing perspective, they may be categorized differently. Priming techniques may be useful for testing this question. Research shows that the singular interpretation can be primed for both Personal (Ye & Arnold, 2025) and Underspecified they (Kesan & Arnold, 2025). An open question is whether priming from underspecified singular they affects the interpretation of personal they, and vice versa. If so, it would suggest that they are categorized together.

Second, the two-kinds proposal suggests that the core difference in underspecified and personal they is the discourse representation. This raises questions about how each form is distributed in discourse contexts. Pronouns tend to be used when the referent is given, prominent, and topical (Ariel 1990; Givon 1983; Gundel et al., 1993). If underspecified they is used more often for underspecified referents, its use may correlate with lower topicality than personal they.

Third, this proposal underscores the need for future research to examine naturalistic contexts where the referents and their pronouns are known to speaker and addressee. Psycholinguistic experiments often don’t provide the critical context for felicitous use of Personal they. Does an appropriate context eliminate processing difficulty?

Fourth, the two-kinds claim is based on current patterns of usage. An open question is how both forms will change over time. Konnelly & Cowper (2020) suggest that stage-3 speakers have no constraints on they, and may even say my mother …. they. Unless the speaker’s mother uses they as a personal pronoun, this would be an example of underspecified singular they. The critical question is whether these productions are truly unconstrained. Assuming that my mother evokes a specific discourse representation, that would be a counterexample to the proposal that this form is restricted to underspecified referents. I have observed that some young adult speakers use they frequently, even for referents whose pronouns are she or he. Thus, the two forms may be merging for some speakers. Recognizing the pragmatic similarities and differences between personal they, underspecified they and older forms will help linguists characterize their current representations as well as how they are changing over time.

Funding information

This project was funded by NSF grant #2438559 to J. Arnold.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to James Kesan and Vic Tianlan Wen for comments on this paper.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Notes

  1. For example, “Style guides have taken note of this movement towards using they/them/their as pronouns to describe individuals when the gender is unknown or irrelevant.” (Chicago Institute, Singular ‘they’: A user’s guide. https://esl.uchicago.edu/2021/06/29/singular-they-a-users-guide/). [^]
  2. Thank you to Ari Trueswell for suggesting this term. Arnold et al. (2024) call this usage “Nonbinary they”, although they acknowledge that some people use they/them as personal pronouns who are not nonbinary. The term “Personal they” highlights the fact that the key criterion is having they as a personal pronoun rather than gender identity. It also distinguishes “personal they” from the subset defined by Konnelly et al. as “Nonbinary they”, defined as using they to refer to a person who is nonbinary. [^]
  3. There are multiple gender identities that are not strictly binary, including nonbinary, agender, gender fluid, gender-queer, and other nontraditional genders. [^]
  4. For example, “… Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that…”, Szalai, 2024 in the New York Times. [^]
  5. See Fourth Wing (Yarros, 2023) for a fiction example where a character with nonbinary pronouns is introduced in passing and not explicitly. [^]
  6. One article was from 2015, and one from 2016, and all the rest were from 2018–2020. [^]

References

Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.

Arnold, Jennifer E. & Kumnick, Kally C. & Wenqin Luo & Garner, Gabrielle W. & Kisley, Ana S. & Levin, Halden. Under review. What drives success in using personal they?: The roles of gender identity, gender concepts, and exposure. Unpublished manuscript, UNC Chapel Hill.

Arnold, Jennifer E. & Marquez, Atziri & Li, Jiefang & Franck, Genevieve 2022. Does personal they inherit the binary pronoun production system? Glossa: Psycholinguistics 1(1). DOI:  http://doi.org/10.5070/G601183

Arnold, Jennifer E. & Mayo, Heather & Dong, Lisa. 2021. My pronouns are they/them: Talking about pronouns changes how pronouns are understood. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 28. 1688–1697. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01905-0

Arnold, Jennifer E. & Venkatesh, Ranjani & Vig, Zachary. 2024. Gender Competition in the Production of Nonbinary ‘They’. Glossa Psycholinguistics 3(1). DOI:  http://doi.org/10.5070/G60111306

Arnold, Jennifer E. & Wen, Vic T. & Fisher, Zachary. 2026. Concepts of gender as a spectrum predict linguistic judgments about singular they. Poster, Human Sentence Processing Conference. March 2026, MIT.

Balhorn, Mark. 2004. The rise of epicene they. Journal of English Linguistics 322. 79–104. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1177/0075424204265824

Baron, Dennis. 2020. What’s your pronoun? Beyond He and She. Liveright Publishing.

Bjorkman, Bronwyn. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 21. 80. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374

Bradley, Evan D. & Salkind, Julia & Moore, Ally & Teitsort, Sofi 2019. Singular ‘they’ and novel pronouns: Gender-neutral, nonbinary, or both? Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 4, Article 36. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4542

Camilliere, Sadie & Izes, Amanda & Levanthal, Olivia & Grodner, Daniel. 2021. They is changing: Pragmatic and grammatical factors that license singular they. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43.

Conrod, Kirby. 2019. Pronouns Raising and Emerging [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Washington.

Conrod, Kirby. 2020. Pronouns and Gender in Language. In Hall, K. and Barrett, E. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford University Press. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.63

Conrod, Kirby. 2022. Variation in English gendered pronouns: Analysis and recommendations for ethics in linguistics. Journal of Language and Sexuality 112. 141–164. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1075/jls.20026.con

Conrod, Kirby & Schultz, R. & Ahn, B. 2022. How many selves for them? In NELS 52: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society.

Dell, Gary S. 1986. A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review 93. 283–321. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.93.3.283

Doherty, Alice & Conklin, Kathy. 2017. How gender-expectancy affects the processing of “them”. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 704. 718–735. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1154582

Foertsch, Julie & Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. 1997. In search of gender neutrality: Is singular they a cognitively efficient substitute for underspecified he? Psychological Science 82. 106–111. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00691.x

Gardner, Bethany. 2023. Learning to comprehend and produce singular they. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University dissertation.

Givón, Talmy. 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Givón, T. (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study, 1–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.3.01giv

Gundel, Jeanette K. & Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69. 274–307. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.2307/416535

Haegeman, Liliane. 1981. Singular they: A recent development? Moderna Sprak 75(3). 235–38.

Hillard, Graham. 2019. Conservatives shouldn’t use transgender pronouns. National Review.

Kesan, James & Arnold, Jennifer E. 2025. Singular “they” exposure increases singular interpretations in ambiguous pronouns. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Meeting.

Konnelly, Lex & Conrod, Kirby & Bradley, Evan D. 2023. Non-binary singular they. The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns, Paterson, Laura (ed.), 450–464. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.4324/9781003349891-37

Konnelly, Lex & Cowper, Elizabeth. 2020. Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 51. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1000

Leventhal, Olivia. 2018. The processing of gender pronouns and non-binary they: Evidence from Event Related Potentials.

Leventhal, Olivia & Camilliere, Sadie & Chen, Peiyao & Grodner, Daniel. 2020. Processing of Nonbinary Singular They: An ERP Study. Poster presented at the 2020 CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference. Amherst, MA.

Moulton, Kier & Han, Chung-hye & Block, Trevor & Gendron, Holly & Nederveen, Sander. 2020 “Singular they in context. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 51. 122.

Newman, Michael. 1992. Pronominal disagreements: The stubborn problem of singular epicene antecedents. Language in Society 2103. 447–475. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500015529

Newman, Michael. 1998. What can pronouns tell us? A case study of English epicenes. Studies in Language 222. 353–389. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1075/sl.22.2.04new

Olson, Samantha. & Fuentes, Tamara. 2022. 25 Non-Binary Celebs Who Are Breaking the Gender Mold. Seventeen Magazine, June 22, 2022.

Prasad, Grusha, & Morris Joanna. 2020. The P600 for singular “they”: How the brain reacts when John decides to treat themselves to sushi [Unpublished manuscript]. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hwzke

Sanders, Wren. 2019. What People Get Wrong About They/Them Pronouns. Them.

Sanford, Anthony J. & Filik, Ruth. 2007. “They” as a gender-unspecified singular pronoun: Eye tracking reveals a processing cost. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 602. 171–178. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1080/17470210600973390

Sevelius, Jae M. & Chakravarty, Deepalika & Dilworth, Samantha E. & Rebchook, Greg & Neilands, Torsten B. 2020. Gender affirmation through correct pronoun usage: Development and validation of the Transgender Women’s Importance of Pronouns TW-IP Scale. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 1724, Article 9525. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249525

Szalai, Jennifer. April 3, 2024. A Gender Theorist Who Just Wants Everyone to Get Along. The New York Times.

Wikipedia. 2025. Asia Kate Dillon. Retrieved May 27, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Kate_Dillon.

Yarros, Rebecca. 2023. Fourth Wing. Shrewsbury, PA: Red Tower Books.

Ye, Yining & Arnold, Jennifer E. 2025. People adapt to Nonbinary Singular They through exposure. Poster; Human Sentence Processing Conference. March 2025, U. Maryland.