And then there are people like myself who have aphantasia and can't visualize and (as in my case) can't hear an internal monologue. I can still think, obviously, but it's often done "somewhere else" (or at least that's how I think of it). I found it best when learning something, for example, to soak in as much of it as I could, then go do something else. I expect to get insights appearing out of the ether later on as some part of my brain assimilates it.
I don't know if this is because of the bicameral mind, but I expect that most people have cognition happening on different levels or in different channels all the time.
I would argue that you understand the relationship between an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your brain is turning it into language to come up with words like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But the abstract relationship did not require language before your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the other way around.
Sometimes when architecting something I'll imagine an elderly person with a child and that'll indicate that I'd want to utilize inheritance instead of composition
Sometimes it's exactly what you'd imagine - I visualize a data model, or an algorithm implementation.
Other times it's more abstract, symbolic, or analogy based