- Speech perception (stress, rhythm, metathesis, laryngeal phonation)
- Prosodic phonology (word stress, reduplication, syllable structure, acoustic features that signal higher-order phonological structure)
- Phonological typology (the study of variation among phonological patterns and structures found across the world's languages)
- The learning of phonological patterns and generalisations by humans and what this can teach us about natural and less natural sound patterns in human languages