Myth-buster: we long heard that bilinguals have better attention and mental control. But many replications failed, and a 2015 analysis found that positive results were far more likely to be published than negative ones. Recent meta-analyses find no clear advantage. The real perk of a second language is still being able to talk to more people.
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.