Linguists at the Max Planck Institute compared how people say “what?” in languages from five continents. Everywhere, they found a short, single-syllable word with a questioning tone, very close to “huh?”. It isn't just a grunt: it's learned, and it adapts to each language's sound system. The finding earned the team an Ig Nobel Prize in 2015.
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.