In the 1930s, Benjamin Whorf claimed that the Hopi language contained no reference to time, so its speakers must think about time differently. This 'strong version' of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in which language determines thought, has since been rejected. In 1983, linguist Ekkehart Malotki showed that Hopi is in fact full of time expressions. Only a weak version survives: language can subtly nudge perception or attention.
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.