It was a RadioLab podcast (http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/)!
The researchers in this episode (one of whom runs The Baby Lab at Harvard) believes that language is what form synaptic connections in the brain to allow humans to relate objects/ideas/emotions to other objects/ideas/emotions. If I remember correctly, their example was that in a lab rat (or, a toddler) searching for a ball in a room with a spatial benchmark (I think they used one colored wall in a square room of otherwise white walls), that lab rat/toddler can have a symbolic or language-based notion of "ball" and of "colored wall."
However, to spatially locate that ball, it requires language of direction in relation to another benchmark ("the ball is left of the colored wall." One of the psychologists (Spelke, I think) concludes that rats/toddlers actually cannot think as a result of not having language to connect those two concepts.
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The researchers in this episode (one of whom runs The Baby Lab at Harvard) believes that language is what form synaptic connections in the brain to allow humans to relate objects/ideas/emotions to other objects/ideas/emotions. If I remember correctly, their example was that in a lab rat (or, a toddler) searching for a ball in a room with a spatial benchmark (I think they used one colored wall in a square room of otherwise white walls), that lab rat/toddler can have a symbolic or language-based notion of "ball" and of "colored wall."
However, to spatially locate that ball, it requires language of direction in relation to another benchmark ("the ball is left of the colored wall." One of the psychologists (Spelke, I think) concludes that rats/toddlers actually cannot think as a result of not having language to connect those two concepts.