Adult speech perception is generally enhanced when information is provided from multiple modalities. In contrast, infants do not appear to benefit from combining auditory and visual speech information early in development. This is true despite the fact that both modalities are important to speech comprehension even at early stages of language acquisition. How then do listeners learn how to process auditory and visual information as part of a unified signal? In the auditory domain, statistical learning processes provide an excellent mechanism for acquiring phonological categories. Is this also true for the more complex problem of acquiring audiovisual correspondences, which require the learner to integrate information from multiple modalities? In this paper, we present simulations using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) that learn cue weights and combine cues on the basis of their distributional statistics. First, we simulate the developmental process of acquiring phonological categories from auditory and visual cues, asking whether simple statistical learning approaches are sufficient for learning multi-modal representations. Second, we use this time course information to explain audiovisual speech perception in adult perceivers, including cases where auditory and visual input are mismatched. Overall, we find that domain-general statistical learning techniques allow us to model the developmental trajectory of audiovisual cue integration in speech, and in turn, allow us to better understand the mechanisms that give rise to unified percepts based on multiple cues.

Background: Young children who stay with their families in homeless shelters face chronic challenges related to extreme poverty and acute risks from stressful events surrounding the loss of housing and move to shelter. These adversities increase the likelihood of a range of poor developmental outcomes. Consistent with the risk and resilience perspective, however, many children who experience family homelessness succeed, functioning as well or better than their non-homeless peers. As such, efforts to support resilience should consider how best to enhance protective factors, such as supportive environments within shelter settings.Methods: With data from 60 caregivers of children ages birth to 5 years recruited from family shelters, we assessed caregivers' perceptions of community support as well as child and family well-being in terms of recent adverse experiences, parenting stress, access to social support, and child social-emotional functioning.Results: Many caregivers experiencing family homelessness perceived negative aspects of the shelters where they were staying with their children. Furthermore, children whose caregivers had more negative perceptions of the shelter environment displayed worse social-emotional functioning, even when accounting for differences in parenting stress, recent family adversity, and other sources of social support.Conclusions: Because young children rely on their caregivers as primary resources for nurturance and support, we encourage family homelessness service providers to work in partnership with caregivers to create more inclusive and empowering practices within the shelter context. Doing so is likely to improve children's developmental outcomes and the overall well-being of the families.

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