Poster Session A (Thursday 12:10-2PM): A13 I am happy to answer questions asynchronously via email at lauren.ackerman@ncl.ac.uk, OSF comments, or live via Zoom meeting from 12:10 to 12:50 ET. (https://us04web.zoom.us/j/9520779369 Meeting ID: 952 077 9369) Abstract: On-going sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic work on singular they observes that people who are more familiar with the trans, non-binary, and gender-variant community (henceforth ‘GV-adjacent’) are able to learn and use non-standard pronouns more easily than the general population. While there are a few studies investigating real-time processing of singular they, they are by and large interested in generic and underspecified uses (e.g., “{Someone/The student}i tripped and hurt themselfi”). Nonbinary and specific uses (“Taylori is nonbinary, so theyi have had to explain theiri pronouns to all theiri professors this semester”) have gotten relatively little attention in the psycholinguistics literature. This study examines how GV-adjacent individuals’ social experiences influence real-time processing of singular they in both specific and generic contexts. It finds that there is a relatively consistent effect of referent (generic vs specific) and occasionally an interaction with community (general vs narrow), which are illustrated by interaction graphs in the poster. These observations support the claim that GV-adjacent people do process singular they differently than the general population. However, the absence of a main effect of community or other interactions also suggest that whatever processing differences exist are very limited in nature. This fits with the long-standing claim in L2 acquisition literature that pronouns are closed-class, and such words are difficult or slow to change once acquired. Please see https://osf.io/j4sy7/ for related works, projects, and manuscripts.