To the second question, 'can language impede the thought process?', I would say it certainly can, and will until we have a perfect language that can describe everything we see/feel/encounter etc.
Douglas Adams certainly thought this was true when he wrote 'The Meaning of Liff', which was a lighthearted attempt to make the English language more inclusive. As he says: "The vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else's bottom is just as real as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you, but hitherto only the latter hs actually had a word for it. Now they both have words. The first one is "shoeburyness" and the second, of course, is "fear".
This is a somewhat tongue in cheek example, but you see the point. If there isn't a word for it, we have trouble describing it. Now I think about it actually, this doesn't really impede thought as such, just the communication of said thought and thus Simon's 'extelligence'. However, I've typed it all out now, so I'm going to post it anyway.