For a long time, French adjectives could agree with the nearest noun: in 1691 Racine still wrote 'ces trois jours et ces trois nuits entières', with 'entières' matching the feminine 'nuits'. In 1647, grammarian Vaugelas declared that the 'more noble' masculine should prevail, while still tolerating the old usage. In 1767, Beauzée justified it by 'the superiority of the male over the female'. This agreement by proximity is back in today's debates on inclusive writing.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.