Russian has no single word for 'blue': goluboy means light blue and siniy dark blue. A 2007 study found that Russian speakers were quicker to tell apart two shades falling on either side of that boundary. But the edge vanished when their verbal memory was kept busy: language nudges perception, it doesn't imprison it.
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.