I recently read an account by a researcher who was investigating the question of what the cognitive landscape would be of someone raised without exposure to language of any kind. She encountered a man, Latin American, who was born profoundly deaf and in a remote environment devoid of signing. No effort had been made to educate the man. No private signing system had been developed within his family. He was nevertheless a functional adult, able to work and survive independently.
The researcher undertook to try to teach the man to sign. She soon realized that the entire world of symbolism was foreign to him. He was eager to understand what she was getting at, but simply imitated her gestures, clearly without getting that they referred to something else. She describes the moment when he realized this. He enthusiastically began going from object to object, soliciting the sign from her. He had just realized the potential for things to have names.
His language developed quickly from that point, but the researcher was anxious to know what it had been like for him to be in the world without language. He rebuffed all of her inquiries on the matter. He would just say, “Why would anyone want to know about that? Those were the stupid times”. Maybe there was just no way to express that state of being.
There has also been some interesting research that suggests that thought is subservient to feeling. In other words, feelings come first, and thought is the brain’s mechanism for making sense of the feelings, encoding them in language in order to rationalize and incorporate them in one’s cognitive worldview.
That understanding agrees well with current theories about the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres. The right hemisphere lacks language, but feels and intuits. The left hemisphere takes its cues about what needs attending to from the intuitions of the right, and then spins the rational framework for those intuitions using its language capacities.