To try Nazi leaders in 1945–1946, the Nuremberg tribunal had to work in four languages: English, French, Russian and German. Instead of translating everything sentence by sentence, the courtroom was fitted with headsets and interpreters translating live. The IBM-supplied system impressed the United Nations, which adopted the method soon after.
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.