In every reader, a small region at the back of the left hemisphere responds specifically to written words. Neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen nicknamed it the brain's 'letterbox'. Whether you read English, Hebrew or Chinese, it sits in the same place, give or take a few millimetres.
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.