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Distinct ERP signatures for singular "they" and gender violations
Joanna Morris1,2, Jesse Snedeker3, Grusha Prasad1,4,5
1School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, United States.
Frontiers in Psychology
|May 18, 2026
Summary
Singular "they" does not cause processing issues like gender mismatches when used by familiar readers. This pronoun engages a distinct interpretive profile, avoiding typical neural signatures of incongruence.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- The English pronoun system is evolving, with increasing use of singular "they".
- A key question is how singular "they" is processed, especially with gendered antecedents.
- It's debated whether singular "they" incurs processing costs similar to gender mismatches.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the processing of singular "they" in relation to gendered antecedents.
- To determine if singular "they" elicits processing costs comparable to canonical gender mismatches.
- To explore the neural signatures associated with singular "they" usage.
Main Methods:
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to measure brain activity.
- Participants with high familiarity with singular "they" were recruited.
- Sentences with reflexive pronouns and varied antecedents (gendered/non-gendered, referential/bound-variable) were presented.
Main Results:
- Gender-incongruent reflexives showed neural signatures of processing difficulty.
- Referential mismatches (e.g., "John…herself") caused integration difficulty.
- Bound-variable mismatches (e.g., "every woman…himself") triggered morphosyntactic repair (P600 effect).
- Singular "themselves" showed distinct patterns: intermediate N400/Nref in referential contexts and no violation in bound-variable contexts.
Conclusions:
- For familiar speakers, singular "themselves" does not function as a canonical agreement mismatch.
- Singular "they" does not necessarily impose a processing cost with gendered antecedents.
- The interpretive profile of singular "they" differs from gender-incongruent pronoun usage.
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