On 7 January 1954, Georgetown University and IBM staged a headline-grabbing demo: an IBM 701 computer translated more than 60 sentences from Russian into English, using a 250-word vocabulary and six grammar rules. Its backers predicted working machine translation within three to five years. In 1966, the ALPAC report, commissioned by the US government, judged the results disappointing and funding collapsed. It would take decades more.
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.