Can thoughts exist without words(code)?

For the most part, the &quot;audio&quot; stream of what I would consider my consciousness reads as words. Excluding the visual stream, I usually hear a voice in my head (usually Peter Griffin) orating whatever bs is going on in my thoughts at the time.<p>Question: What did our consciousness &quot;talk&quot; like before we had a firm grasp of a spoken language?<p>For example:<p>Can an infant that hasn&#x27;t learned a language yet talk to his&#x2F;herself?<p>If so, how would that stream of information be &quot;tokenized&quot;?<p>If you can tokenize this stream, and if higher level languages (like English) can presumably be built on top of it, does that make this the &quot;assembly&quot; language common to all spoken languages?<p>[P.S. No clue how we would know, just fun to think about :) ]