Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

Thought and language are intertwined in ways we don’t fully grasp. The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language—it just means we might not yet understand how it does. Thought could employ other forms of linguistic-like processes that Fedorenko's experiments, or even current brain-imaging techniques, fail to capture.

There could be functional redundancies or alternative systems at play that we haven't identified, systems that allow thought to access linguistic capabilities even when the specialized language areas are offline or unnecessary. The question of what "language in thought" looks like remains open, particularly in tasks requiring comprehension. This underscores the need for further exploration into how thought operates and what role, if any, latent or alternative linguistic functionalities play when conventional language regions aren't active.

In short, we may have a good understanding of language in isolation, but not necessarily in its broader role within the cognitive architecture that governs thought, comprehension, and meaning-making.

> The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language

All other things being equal, its is a reason to provisionally reject the hypothesis that those kinds of thought use language as introducing entities (the ties between those kinds of thought and language) into the model of reality being generated that are not needed to explain any observed phenomenon.

Moreover, I believe that one should distinguish between "language" and "words".

The parent article is mostly about thinking without "words", not necessary without a "language".

Some thoughts might be completely different from sentences in a language, probably when they have a non-sequential nature, but other thoughts are exactly equivalent to a sentence in a language, except that they do not use the words.

I can look and see to things that I recognize, e.g. A and B, and I can see that one is bigger than the other and I can think "A is bigger than B" without thinking at the words used in the spoken language, but nonetheless associating some internal concepts of "A", "B" and "is greater than", exactly like when formulating a spoken sentence.

I do not believe that such a thought can be considered as an example of thinking without language, but just as an example that for a subset of the words used in a spoken language there is an internal representation that is independent of the sequence of sounds or letters that compose a spoken or written language.

I would like to propose that reasoning needs an intermediate representation for it to be effective. Consider the scene graph representation in computer graphics. This scene graph is the intermediate representation. The algorithm is not reasoning about individual pixels of two objects interacting in the scene graph. It uses IR. Now for some that IR takes the form of language/words. For some it takes the form of visuals. For some, these are just abstract feelings.