With a team of deaf and hearing researchers, Dr. Victoria Nyst, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, will compare the gesturing of hearing speakers with the sign languages that emerged in villages with a high incidence of deafness in West Africa, to establish whether grammatical differences in sign languages can be traced to cross-cultural differences in gesture.

Interpolation plays an important role in mathematical logic and computer science. It is a method of separating statements into different categories. It is for example used to restrict databases to a user-specified domain. Interpolation does not work in every logic. The researcher will develop new mathematical techniques to characterize criteria under which interpolation works and applies these results to solve questions about interpolation in the theory of knowledge bases.