They're digging up the road again: the processing cost of institutional they

It is commonplace to use the pronoun they to refer to agents in certain situations without ever providing a referent, as in On the train, they served really bad coffee. Such an example we call “Institutional They”, because such defaults typically represent the actions of some agent tied stereotypically to a situation. These cases represent an important subset of unheralded pronouns (Gerrig, 1986), pronouns without any explicit antecedent. While in many situations, the occurrence of referential pronouns without explicit antecedents entails a processing cost, an eye-tracking experiment revealed no reliable detectable costs associated with Institutional They. However, there were for singular pronouns without antecedents in the same situations. We argue that Institutional They cases result from properties of plural pronouns (they and them). These will accept underspecified type-referents, while singular pronouns require specified token-referents. Failure to identify token-referents results in disruption of processing in the case of singulars, but not in the case of the plurals.