Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In order to probe the production of kinematic cues to signal boundaries in action sequences, adults performed sequences of three actions on an object, with or without an action boundary following the second action. Movement of the hand was recorded via motion tracking, and it was found that the boundary was marked by a lengthening of the pre-boundary action and by a pause. These cues are also found in prosody to signal phrase boundaries in speech, suggesting a close coupling of the mechanisms underlying boundary production in both domains.