What's there to explain? There's two parts of the brain involved in speech generation, damage one of them and you suddenly lose the ability to work with words.

What's there to explain? There's two parts of the brain involved in speech generation, damage one of them and you suddenly lose the ability to work with words. Depending on the extent of the damage, you will lose various comprehension abilities. Like I stated earlier, I don't think all cognition is linguistic in nature, but I think you'll definitely lose 'something' if you break your language part. My argument is that without language, we'll be present-focused and unable to appreciate conceptual subtleties, due to the inability to name and remix thoughts. Like other nonverbal mammals.