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It's 100% good to study this, but the glaring issue is they're using people whose brains developed with language but now have lost that capability.
We need to be looking at people who never learned language and how their brains develop.
Which isn't really ethical in anyway.
Kind of like how we could learn so much if we started separating corpus callosums again, but you can't just do that to people just to see what happens.
Isn't language so important for human development feral children never manage to make it back into society?
Not never
But yeah, if you're not learning it young you're super far behind and might never catch up.
For this it would need to be taken even further though, you'd need people at least 25 who had never been exposed to language in any way. Most feral children are found after just a few years in the wild. I don't think there's ever been an adult human that never was exposes to language and then reintegrated.
Isn't this kinda obvious. Plenty of animals have the capacity to reason. And I genuinely don't feel like i am using words in my head all the time anyway.
The more serious formulation of the hypothesis is that communication is superimposed on a "language" capacity that evolved for cognition.
To take a completly non controversial example of how that could work, consider the more mechanical side of how language works. Our respiratory system evolved to exchange co2 and o2 with the atmosphere. Our mouth evolved to be the first stage of our digestive system. Our ears evolved for general sensory input. None of those systems evolved for communication, but are central to the mechanics of how we communicate.
In the same way, the idea was that we developed a set of genetal purpose cognitive tools, and the only thing specific to communication was the ability to serialize de-serialize those thoughts into soundwaves.