- Parallel gesturing/Mirroring, Mimicry ^cfe702
- How do children mirror their parents? How do parents mirror their children? (cf. Motherese)
- Do our gesture patterns align change to fit the ones our listeners/interlocutors typically use?
- Social context, trust and relationships
- Does the amount of gestures we use depend on the relationship between ourselves and our listeners?
- Can there be ritualised gestures between a group of specific speakers? (cf. insider jokes)
- Can gestures convey in-group vs out-group identity?
- Visibility ^10f24a
- Why do blind people gesture?
- Do people gesture when they can’t see each other?
- Phonetics
- How are different types of gestures and intonation curves related to each other?
- Language acquisition
- What role do gestures play in early (first) language acquisition? (e.g. deictic gesture + noun = I want this, gimme this)
- Do bilingual children gesture differently than monolingual children?
- How do gestures develog/change in areas of intense language contact?
- When do we start developing gestures?
- Can/Do we acquire gestures as we acquire a different spoken language?
- Culture & Anthropology
- Are gestures language- or culture-dependent?
- Are different gesture patterns evidence for a different model of the world? Do the gestures we use affect the way we see and interact with our environment?
- Are gestures part of socialisation, i.e. can they be taught? (e.g. Schweigefuchs or shhh finger-in-front-of-mouth)
- Language diversity across languages: By comparing everything to English, are we missing out on languages that seem to not have a way to express concept A but do actually have gestures for it? (based on the idea that language and gesture are part of the same model: communication)
- Discourse
- In what way are gestures used to refer back and forth in time?
- Which gestures do we use to convey whose turn it is to speak?
- Gestures we live by: Metaphoric use
- Gestures for problem-solving
- If gestures change the way we see our environment, can they help us learn? (interacting with concepts in a 3D space?)
- Crosslinguistic phenomena
- Are there any universal types of gestures?