Another account of such an individual, including that breakthrough moment, is ‘Voyage to the Island”, by Raija Neiminen.

[...]Life without language « Neuroanthropology[...]…

Anyway, thinking with words is not something I do and judging by some comments my paternal Grandfather once made I don’t think he does either. I’ve got vague memories of the realisation as a child that others ‘thought’ with words, but I still have trouble accepting that it works that way – are they really *certain* they don’t go from thought to words without realising it? Learning new languages after leaving my home country in my early twenties (I was monolingual English way back then) hasn’t helped either; a language is something I change at need and nothing fixed. I remember being confused by the question ‘what language do you think in?’ when I learned my second language (Swedish) – it simply did not compute for me.

What’s it like one might ask? Hard to describe in words (what did you expect?) but one way I try to verbalise it is ‘collections of related information moved around in a multidimensional space at varying scales’. Chaos when it doesn’t work, highly effective when it does, but mostly somewhere between the two limits.

I’m surprised that either researcher would consider a purely (or even mostly) mimetic approach to understanding for individuals like Ildefonso who didn’t learn formalized language until later in life. I can see how the comparison is tempting, but it is altogether too limiting in my opinion and does not account for creative processes like adaptation and generation of new symbols, signed or otherwise. In the case of Iledefonso, this would have prevented him from being able to communicate with other language-less people he met prior to learning to sign, which he said he was able to do. Further, the phenomenon of home signs (shared signs for rudimentary communication among family and friends) is universal among deaf children who are not exposed to deaf communities or taught signed languages. Shcaller’s first interactions with Ildefonso were met with miming, but that doesn’t mean his primary system of thought or communication was mimetic.

That said, I am equally as fascinated and perplexed by the deaf individuals I’ve met and worked with (all children) who live substantial parts of their lives without formal language. Not once had it entered my mind that they lived without thought, symbols, or communication prior to their access to signed language- and I don’t believe this to be true. The speed, enthusiasm, and agility with which they are able to learn sign language and the complexity of their expressions upon learning belie any such assumption. Indeed, experiencing this miraculous transformation firsthand is one of the primary motivations for my own research.

A few examples from Temple Grandin:

“My experience as a visual thinker with autism makes it clear to me that thought does not have to be verbal… to be real.” (1996)

“To understand the mind of a child or adult who is completely non-verbal, without oral, sign, or written language, you must leave the world of thinking in words. This can be quite challenging for many people. Our society functions through the spoken word. For the majority of people, words are their ‘native language’. It is difficult for them to step outside this very basic way of relating and imagine something else.” (2008)

RE: “Languageless” people

I’ve worked with many “languageless” people – non-verbal autistic individuals who have been said were communicatively impaired because they lacked “language”. I’d say they lack ‘verbal language’, not ‘language’. Let me explain,
Language is typically defined as a system of symbols/signs and methods (rules) of combination of these symbols used by a section or group of people (e.g., a nation) that serves as a means of communication and formulating and expressing thoughts. It is conventional to identify signs in this definition as words. The error of mistaking the acoustic/written manifestation of language (reflected in speech) for language itself leads to the misconception that the language is necessarily verbal. However, though conventional, verbal (linguistic) words are not the only signs that satisfy the criteria of language. It is logical, therefore, to distinguish two types of languages – verbal (consisting of words) and non-verbal (consisting of non-verbal symbols). From this perspective, the assumption (expressed by some professionals) that non-verbal children ‘lack inner language’ is incorrect. Autistic individuals emphasise that all autistic people have a form of inner language even if they cannot communicate through conventional systems, such as typing, writing or signing.
What I’m trying to say is, that autistic children (or at least some of them) ‘speak’ (even those who are non-verbal) different languages, with their own concepts, categories, etc.
Verbal language is sort of foreign to them.
Autistic children, like non-autistic ones, learn through interactions with the world, but this interaction is qualitatively different. They learn their language(s) through interaction with objects and people on the sensory level. That is why, their ‘words’ have nothing to do with conventional names for things and events we use to describe the function of these things and events. Their ‘words’ are not ‘envelopes’ but templates – if something ‘feels’ the same they know what to do about it; if the ‘feeling’ is a little bit different – they do not understand this ‘word’ and may be confused. Their ‘words’ are literal (- stored sensations produced by objects through interaction) and they name them accordingly. One sense (sometimes several) becomes dominant for storing memories, developing ‘language’, and constructing thoughts.
The most common type of perceptual thinking in autism is visual. For visual thinkers, the ideas are expressed as images that provide a concrete basis for understanding. Every thought is represented by a ‘picture’. Visual thinkers actually see their thoughts. For them, words are like a second language. In order to understand what is being said to them or what they are reading they have to translate it into images. Temple Grandin, probably the most famous ‘visual thinker’ in the world, describes how she has to translate both spoken and written words into full-colour movies with sound, which run ‘like a VCR tape’ in her head.
Contrary to recent stereotype, not all autistic people think in pictures. In fact, those with severe visual perceptual problems have a great difficulty to easily retrieve mental pictures in response to words. Instead, they may use auditory, kinaesthetic or tactile images. Many may not actually be able to visualise and may be deprived of what could work for them and their intelligence is then wrongly judged by their inability to link visual images with words . Despite all the differences, the one thing in common for all these languages is that they are non-verbal and ‘sensory/perceptually-based’.
Here we may distinguish several ‘sensory-based languages’:
Visual language: They use visual images.
Tactile language: Children ‘speaking’ tactile language recognise things by touching them, feeling textures and surfaces with their hands, bare feet, or their cheeks. Through touch they get the information about the size and form of things, but not about their function or purpose. They store the information for later reference and may find similar objects (e.g., a plastic cup and a glass cup) to be completely different ‘words’ in their vocabulary because they ‘feel’ different.
Kinaesthetic language: Children learn about things through the physical movements of their body. Each thing or event is identified by certain pattern of body movements. They know places and distances by the amount and pattern of the movement of the body.
Auditory language: Children remember objects and events by ‘sound pictures’. If the object is ‘silent’, they may tap it to recognise it by the sound it produces.
Smell language: Objects and people are identified by smell.
Taste language: Children lick objects and people to feel the taste they give on the tongue.
No wonder, spoken words are often perceived as mere sounds. It is difficult to sense or feel a ball, for example, in the auditory frame BALL. They do not recognise the thing if given its verbal (conventional) name, however, they may identify it with the sound it produces while bouncing, the smell or the feel on the hand. Each child may use one or several ‘languages’ to make sense about the world. Given perceptual differences, including sensory perceptual problems (fragmentation, hyper- or hyposensitivities, etc.), one or several systems may become inconsistent and/or meaningless, and they have to use those that are reliable (different for different individuals) to check the information they are flooded with. Each child has unique sensory perceptual profile and has acquired (voluntarily or involuntarily) compensations and strategies to recognise things and make sense of the world. One and the same child may use different systems at different times depending on many factors that can influence the ‘perceptual quality’, such as stress, fatigue, ‘environmental sensory pollution’ (bright lights, noise), etc.
Perceptual thinkers have trouble with words that cannot be translated into mental images (whether visual, kinaesthetic, tactile, etc.) and often have problems learning abstract things that cannot be imagined via perceptual mode – like ‘ideas’ in your example.