Intra- and Inter-personal Coordination of Speech, Gesture and Breathing Movements

This study is meant to contribute, from a psychological viewpoint, to the development of a “symbiotic” system, an intelligent system capable of “living with” human beings. We approach this by examining how people interact gesturally with each other, with a special focus on breathing movements. Within this general framework, the present paper reports two experiments conducted to examine the dynamics underlying intra- and inter-personal coordination of speech articulation, hand gesture movements, and breathing movements. The results reveal similarities as well as differences between intra- and inter-personal coordination, and we discuss their implications for existing theories of motor coordination, as well as for the development of human-machine symbiotic systems.