Myth-buster: bilingual children say their first words and first sentences at roughly the same ages as monolingual children. Their vocabulary in each language may look smaller, but counted across both, it's comparable. And mixing languages within a sentence is a normal stage, not a sign of confusion.
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.