One of the groups is looking at the question of whether women can be ordained as deacons.
This option is currently only open to men in the Catholic Church.
At a press conference on Thursday, Vatican representatives presented the ten questions that the ten new study groups are to deal with by June 2025.
These include, for example, preaching in a digitalised world, adjustments to priestly training, the ministry of bishops and their selection, as well as fundamental questions regarding ministries in the Church.
Each of the ten groups is to submit a short report with a work plan and an explanation of their topic by 5 September.
When asked by a journalist, the Secretary General of the International Commission of Theologians, Piero Coda, said that access to the diaconate would "certainly" be one of the specific topics that the experts will deal with.
Pope Francis formulated the ten questions in a letter to Cardinal Mario Grech, Secretary General of the Synod.
They emerged from previous debates at the World Synod.
In terms of content, the church assembly is about new ways of consulting and making decisions in the church of the future and about more togetherness.
Connection to the Synod through presentation of interim results
The topics discussed in the study groups will no longer be put to the vote at the World Synod in October, according to the letter.
In order to maintain a link to the World Synod, the study groups are to present the status of their work at the second central synod meeting in the Vatican in October.
From 2 to 27 October, the approximately 400 participants of the 16th General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops are to meet in Rome for the second and final part. This will mark the end of the world synod on the topic of synodality.
Among the 350 or so participants with voting rights last October were Catholic laypeople for the first time, including 54 women.
The work of the study groups should enable the Synod Assembly "to concentrate more easily in its second session on the general theme that I once assigned to it and which can now be summarised in the question: How to be a synodal Church that goes out?" the Pope wrote to Grech.
He had initiated the multi-year process of the World Synod in October 2021 and emphasised at the time that the synodal path was a "slow, perhaps arduous exercise."