From experience, I am skeptical of this hypothesis. Little kids will absolutely recall memories from before they knew how to speak.

Just last week, my two-year-old spied the freezer pops in storage. She pointed out back and said, "Eat on deck!" Clearly, she remembered eating freezer pops on the deck, but the last time she did that was last summer (northern hemisphere) when she didn't know how to talk at all, let alone say "deck".

There are people without internal monologues, and most people can also visualize something and remember scenery without words. There are also animals that (likely) don't have language that apparently have memories.

That's interesting, because my earliest memory was wordplay related. Though I doubt I could have strung a sentence together at the time, there were definitely words involved. I have a few relatively early memories, but none that are totally pre-language.

Animals have no meaningful language but clearly have memory. Also the separation between thinking and language becomes quite clear as you learn another language and realize that asking what language you think in is not such an easy question to answer.

In her autobiography, Helen Keller describes memories from her childhood, before she was taught to communicate, so it would seem language isn't necessarily a prerequisite for memory formation.

I can't counterexample the first half, but my only vivid memory from being a 2-year-old is primarily visual (though it does involve surprise at the reality contrasting with a prior description in words).

My dog sometimes buries a bone when we give him one. Later he digs it up and chews on it some more. He forms a memory of where he buried it without the use of language (I'm pretty sure).

> Without language, how does one "record" the memory?

The same way one rides a bicycle without telling themselves to balance and operate the brakes.

No, you can also remember physical activity.