IN SEARCH OF GENDER NEUTRALITY - IS SINGULAR THEY A COGNITIVELY EFFICIENT SUBSTITUTE FOR GENERIC HE

With increasing frequency, writers and speakers are ignoring grammatic al proscription and using the plural pronoun they to refer to singular antecedents. This change may, in part, be motivated by efforts to mak e language more gender inclusive. In the current study, two reading-ti me experiments demonstrated that singular they is a cognitively effici ent substitute for generic he or she, particularly when the antecedent is nonreferential. In such instances, clauses containing they were re ad (a) much more quickly than clauses containing a gendered pronoun th at went against the gender stereotype of the antecedent, and (b) just as quickly as clauses containing a gendered pronoun that matched the s tereotype of the antecedent. However, with referential antecedents, fo r which the gender was presumably known, clauses containing singular t hey were not read as quickly as clauses containing a gendered pronoun that matched the antecedent's stereotypic gender.