There was a paper on HN some years ago that in my mind settled the old question whether humans share a universal grammer to process language. The gist was that a visual image is parsed the same way as language is, with noun phrases and verb phrases combined into complex structures. It is convenient for linguists to claim that consciousness requires language. I suspect consciousness is a form of seeing and visualising oneself. Maybe a way of planning ahead by trying different solutions in the mind without doing them in the physical world.