Playground Series

Playground is intended to open a window into a world, however familiar it may first appear, that resonates with one of our universal compassions and the icons of contemporary life: the act and ritual of taking photographs. This project aims to magnify the extraordinary in the ordinary, revealing facial expressions, gestures or body language of the subjects behind their own visual recording device. It is about the drama of people in their private moments, when their face or body language reveals the most hidden parts of their inner world in public places. The interplay between private and public, individual and social are the main inhabitants of this photographic project.

Visual Speech Segmentation: Using Facial Cues to Locate Word Boundaries in Continuous Speech

Speech is typically a multimodal phenomenon, yet few studies have focused on the exclusive contributions of visual cues to language acquisition. To address this gap, we investigated whether visual prosodic information can facilitate speech segmentation. Previous research has demonstrated that language learners can use lexical stress and pitch cues to segment speech and that learners can extract this information from talking faces. Thus, we created an artificial speech stream that contained minimal segmentation cues and paired it with two synchronous facial displays in which visual prosody was either informative or uninformative for identifying word boundaries. Across three familiarisation conditions (audio stream alone, facial streams alone, and paired audiovisual), learning occurred only when the facial displays were informative to word boundaries, suggesting that facial cues can help learners solve the early challenges of language acquisition.