Understanding how individuals narrate challenging life experiences is crucial to understanding identity (Bauer et al., 2019). Yet, little research has analyzed how the structure and content of racial/ethnic challenge narratives corresponds with identity. In this study, we quantified the theme of redemption (negative beginnings, positive endings) within racial/ethnic challenge narratives gathered during semi-structured interviews with 176 racially and ethnically diverse young adults in college (M age =20.25, SD =2.88; 103 women, 72 men, 1 non-binary; 68 Asian American, 63 Latine, 24 Multiracial, 16 White, & 5 Black/African American participants). Narratives were also coded for content themes including affective tone and event type (e.g., connection to culture and awareness of difference). Narrative themes were examined in relation to self-reported measures of racial/ethnic identity. Although, there were no correlations between redemption and racial/ethnic identity measures, there were significant associations between content themes and racial/ethnic identity. Positive narratives and narratives describing an awareness of difference corresponded with higher and lower levels of racial/ethnic identity, respectively. There were no significant differences in redemption based on event type. However, Latine participants were more likely than Asian American participants to narrate experiences reflecting awareness of difference from the outgroup. Overall, this study provides insight into the narrative themes that define young adults’ challenges around race/ethnicity and their associations with this aspect of identity.

Parental guidance extends beyond foundational care, playing a critical role in cultivating understandings of cultural background(s) and ethnic identity in children (Hernandez et al., 2014). The specialized practices, experiences, and values parents use to culturally socialize their children can shape ethnic identities across youth and into adulthood (Desmarais et al., 2024). Limited research has explored the specific cultural socialization practices (e.g., music, food, and language) and parent-child relationships (e.g., closeness) through qualitative documentation. However, more research is needed on understanding how individuals navigate multicultural identities as well as the unique formation and strength of each identity. This study is guided by two research questions RQ1: How is parental cultural socialization related to Mexican and American ethnic pride and identities? RQ2: Do individuals from multicultural backgrounds gravitate towards one cultural identity more than the other? What factors shape individuals’ identification with their Mexican and American identities and Why? Study 1 includes a secondary analysis of the ethnic socialization, cultural identity, and Mexican-American ethnic pride measures from the California Families Project (CFP). Study 2 will employ a mixed-methods survey completed by undergraduate students of Mexican and Mexican-American descent from the University of California, Riverside. Study 2 adapts measures from the CFP, and derives qualitative prompts that expand on specific cultural socialization practices and processes that form ethnic identity. This study has the capacity to inform ethnic identity research and increase understanding of the potential lasting effects of childhood cultural socialization into adulthood, and the navigation of multiple cultural identities.

Speech intelligibility refers to the accuracy with which a person’s speech is reported by others. This ability can be heavily influenced by a listener’s own perceptions and assumptions based on the speaker’s identity. For example, leading someone to believe that they are listening to an East Asian individual results in them reporting different sentences than when they are led to believe the same person is white. Previous studies have explored this phenomenon, although predominantly featuring listeners who were native speakers of English. Our experiment builds on these studies while focusing on the impact racial identity perception may have on listeners who learned English later in life (L2 listeners) compared with native speakers (L1 listeners). The intention of this study is to determine whether the influence of talker’s actual or assumed racial identity on speech intelligibility differs between L1 listeners, and L2 listeners. In this experiment, six different individuals (two white, two Latina, and two Black) produced twenty sentences that were presented to three groups of listeners. Ten of these sentences were given with audio only, while the other ten included both audio and visual input. All sentences were presented with background noise, and listeners were tasked with transcribing what they heard. Transcriptions were scored for the accuracy of the response to the actual sentence. The findings of this study will help us understand the nature of racial identity effects in speech intelligibility, and help engage with the community of L2 listeners, which is typically underserved by speech-language pathologists and audiologists.

Infants growing up in bilingual environments are often exposed to parent’s code-switching language use. Code-switching occurs when speakers switch languages between or during a sentence. Code-switching is a characteristic of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) for bilingual caregivers (Kremin et al., 2022) and it has been shown to be beneficial for language development in infants (Bail et al., 2015). During these conversations, infants partake in turn taking. Research suggests a bidirectional relationship between the development of language skills and the growth of turn-taking abilities (Donnelly & Kidd, 2021). However, there is a lack of research examining how infants partake in turn-taking in bilingual environments. The purpose of this study is to examine bilingual infant vocalizations in response to parents' language use. Spanish-English bilingual mothers and their infants participated in a naturalistic study where they were given toys and were video and audio recorded during play. We analyzed the caregiver's language use in relation to infants’ vocalizations. We are interested in investigating the co-occurrence between caregiver’s code-switched utterances and infant’s responses within turn taking interactions. We predict that infants' vocalizations will increase in response to code-switching, as the change in language may draw greater attention to the utterance during turn-taking instances. However, when examining the frequency of infants' vocalizations in relation to parents' language use, we predict no difference across English or Spanish utterances.