[tokenadult]

It goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language.

I have met other people who share your intuition, but for me (native speaker of English with normal hearing) and for my wife (native speaker of Taiwanese with normal hearing) it is routine to think visually, with no words at all. We have multiple thinking styles, and quite a bit of our thinking does not involve words. I used to have the intuition that everyone can think visually, until I met people who self-report that they cannot imagine doing so.