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Mouthings. Researchers investigating mouthings consistently report that some mouthings appear to be more “complete” than others are. Happ & Hohenberger refer to these as “full” and “restricted” mouthings. Vogt-Svendsen also specifically notes reductions.
Repeatedly, contributors describe more mouthings with nouns and uninflected forms of verbs, while mouth gestures are seen more with verbs. Mouthings are described as occurring with manual homonyms in several languages. Several researchers also make the distinction of mouthings being used for open class elements but not for closed class elements (cf. for example Happ & Hohenberger and Boyes Braem). Sutton-Spence & Day further observe that mouthings occur with morphologically simpler signs (whereas mouth gestures occur with signs that are morphologically more complex).
Ebbinghaus & Hessmann present arguments to support their view that mouthings and mouth gestures are very separate entities (and different again from manual components). On the other hand, Vogt-Svendsen compares the functions and uses of mouthings and mouth gestures in an attempt to find what they have in common, rather than in what way they differ. She finds that in many cases the two types of mouth pattern function in very similar ways.
Sociolinguistic variations in mouth pattern use were also reported in different languages (see especially Sutton-Spence & Day, Happ & Hohenberger) as does the factor of age of acquisition of the language (cf. Keller and Boyes Braem).
The “stretching” or “spreading” of mouthings over more than one manual sign has been observed by several of the contributors (Happ & Hohenberger, Sutton-Spence & Day, Vogt-Svendsen and Boyes Braem). There appears to be general agreement that these “stretched” components serve to bind the manual components, perhaps at the prosodic level (Boyes Braem).
The phenomenon of mouthings being used in the absence of a manual component has also been reported in several languages. Several contributors have also reported on the occurrence of “mismatches” in which the meaning of the manual sign is not the same as the meaning of the spoken word from which the mouthing is apparently derived.
Mouth Gestures. Mouth gestures similarly formed and driven were reported in most languages. At the Leiden workshop, Marit Vogt-Svendsen neatly summed up the extent of the similarities between these kinds of mouth patterns in European sign languages by recalling how she had watched signers tell the story of “The Snowman” in twelve different sign languages and seen Norwegian Sign Language mouth gestures in all of them.