In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay compared colour terms across many languages. Those with just two terms contrast light and dark. When a third appears, it is almost always red, followed by green or yellow, and only later blue. The details are still debated, but the overall pattern has proven remarkably robust.
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.