More Than 1v1: Human-AI Alignment in Early Developmental Communities with Multimodal LLMs

In early developmental contexts, particularly in parent-child interaction analysis, alignment involves families and professionals such as speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who interpret children's everyday interactions from different roles. When multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are introduced to support this process, alignment becomes a question of how authority, responsibility, and emotional risk are distributed across stakeholders. Through a three-part study with five families and three SLPs, we trace how MLLM-generated outputs move from expert-facing analysis to parent-facing feedback. We propose layered community alignment: grounding representations in expert-aligned structures, mediating translation through professional guardrails, and enabling family-level adaptation within those boundaries. We argue that alignment in developmental settings should be treated as a community-governed process rather than an individual optimisation problem.