This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged.

This is an important point and I would also add 'social thinker'. That tends to be the non-native mode that I most benefit from emulating. I translate the words into what they would mean as bits of status processing rather than descriptions of reality and suddenly things make sense. I am not sure to what extent this kind of thinking is related to 'verbal'. I don't think verbally either, which causes me to be dumbfounded at times at the kinds of communications that people find most persuasive.