The only processing cost for hen occurred in the spillover region. The processing cost of hen was measured by reading time spent on three regions of the sentence pairs the pronoun, the spillover region (i.e., the words following the pronoun), and the noun.

Furthermore, we hypothesized that hen referring to lexically gendered nouns would lead to larger processing costs than stereotypically gendered role nouns. The hypotheses were that hen referring to neutral nouns would lead to a smaller processing cost than hen referring to gendered nouns.

We tested if hen had a greater processing cost than gendered pronouns, and whether the type of noun moderated this effect. The nouns were either neutral (e.g., person, colleague) or gendered, either by lexically referring to gender (e.g., sister, king), or by being associated with stereotypes based on occupational gender segregation (e.g., occupational titles like hairdresser, carpenter). The pronouns were either gendered (she and he) or gender-neutral (hen). Participants ( N = 120) read 48 sentence pairs where the first sentence included a noun referring to a person (e.g., sister, hairdresser, person) and the second included a pronoun referring to the noun. This pre-registered study used eye-tracking to experimentally test if hen has a processing cost by measuring the process of understanding whom a pronoun refers to (i.e., pronoun resolution). As of yet, this has not been empirically tested. Hen was added to the Swedish Academy Glossary (SAOL) in 2015, and opponents of hen have argued that gender-neutral pronouns are difficult to process, and therefore should not be used. Hen is a Swedish gender-neutral pronoun used for non-binary individuals and as a generic singular pronoun form.

4Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.

3Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, United States.

2Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden.

1Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.

Renström 1,4 and Marie Gustafsson Sendén 1 Vergoossen 1*, Philip Pärnamets 2,3, Emma A.

What are the 78 gender pronouns