This thesis seeks to build upon the growing body of research on nonbinary-gendered speakers (Gratton 2016; Goldberg & Kuvalanka 2018; Garmpi 2020) by employing two studies – a sociolinguistic interview study with nonbinary participants to investigate variable usage of (ING) by nonbinary speakers across conversation topics and a phonetic imitation task that tests the effect that social information about an unknown interlocutor has on nonbinary participants' speech production. The results of the sociolinguistic interview study find that despite a markedly more deliberative style during topics about gender, participants do not shift rates of (ING) across topics. Furthermore, the sociolinguistic interview study finds that a speaker’s assigned gender at birth plays no predictable role in rates of (ING). The results of the phonetic imitation task find that nonbinary speakers show statistically significant greater divergence away from a model speaker that is stated to be cis than a model speaker stated to be nonbinary or a model speaker where no gender identity information is given. Additionally, the phonetic imitation task results find that nonbinary speakers show statistically less divergence away from a model speaker stated to be nonbinary that a model speaker stated to be cis or a model speaker where no gender identity information is given. Taken together, the results of these two studies suggest that nonbinary speakers have a speech style that is more likely to pattern with other nonbinary speakers in their network and that being in explicitly queer contexts enables nonbinary speakers to pattern more like another nonbinary speaker than like a cis-identified speaker.
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