This study contributes to the emerging literature on gender identity and pronoun use by exploring strategies to refer to unknown human referents. In an online survey involving mainly a university population aged 29 and below, participants were first asked to pick a potential roommate from two fictional characters with gender-ambiguous names and write short answers explaining their choice. Secondly, participants were explicitly asked what pronoun they would use to refer to an unknown human referent from a list of neopronouns in addition to singular they. The results show a strong association between participants’ self-identified gender and the gendered pronoun used. The results also show singular they is the most popular gender-inclusive pronoun for an unknown individual while pronoun avoidance strategies include repeating names and using generic nouns. Additionally, the reflexive form themself is preferred over themselves for unknown human referents, in contrast to previous research showing almost the same rate of naturalness for themselves and themself in the specific-reference context.

中文翻译：

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性别认同和非二元代词使用

这项研究通过探索指代未知人类指称的策略，为新兴的关于性别认同和代词使用的文献做出了贡献。在一项主要涉及 29 岁及以下大学人口的在线调查中，参与者首先被要求从两个名字不明确的虚构角色中挑选一个潜在的室友，并写下简短的答案来解释他们的选择。其次，参与者被明确询问除了单数之外，他们将使用什么代词来指代新代词列表中的未知人类所指对象。结果表明，参与者的自我认同性别与使用的性别代词之间存在很强的关联。结果还表明，单数的他们是未知个体最流行的包含性别的代词，而代词避免策略包括重复名称和使用通用名词。此外，对于未知的人类所指对象而言，自反形式本身比他们自己更受欢迎，这与之前的研究显示，在特定参考上下文中，他们自己和他们自己的自然率几乎相同。