Read the 5th Ed codex for lizardmen, it gives a good clue to how the skinks operate. In one of the fluff pieces Marco Columbo allies with the slann against the Dark Elves. The Slann asks him 3 questions. Have you seen any gigantic godlike snakes in your homeland? How big is the ocean on your maps? How do you "new ones" make more of yourselves? Marco columbo says, no big snakes, this big, and err... um...
The slann tells him, okay good, that means sotek is underground whooping Skaven, all according to plan. Good, those are the numbers we have also, all according to plan. Hmm, I don't know what loud music and alcohol have to do with making more people but that's what this dwarf said also so.... all according to plan.
During the encounter with the skinks he figures out why the Lizardmen get pissed off and don't trade with humans typically, humans always ask for gold, and the Lizardmen believe that gold is sacred and that if humans have any they should give it to it's rightful owner, them. Fortunately, Marco Columbo figures out how to get paid when he sees a skink accountant tallying up the trades with an abacus, that uses marble sized pearls as the beads. There's a joke about how the humans traded all this stuff for a bunch of beads.
At one point a skink even LIES TO A SLANN because he doesn't feel like the slann needs to hear what Marco wants translated and instead tells him that Marco is saying, "what a nice amulet you have", "your such a cool toad", stuff like that. As far as I've seen, Saurus probably never think anything in their whole life. As in, no words go on in their head, they don't ponder, they just do. Everything they say is from the gut, and everything they do they've all done a bugillion times before. You have to remember that saurus live for like....5000 + years? Many of those guys on the tabletop have been marching and drilling literally since dinosaurs ruled the Earth. In the Seventh edition a slann even tells Gor-Rok "retrieve" and points at something. They don't get mental domination and orders the way the Tyranids do, but the slann can give pretty vague orders and expect the Saurus to really only do one thing, Beat something to death.
We joked about how a skink could be an asshole to a kroxigor by saying, Okay Krox, take these logs and cut them in half. Later. Good job Krox, now line them up like this and pound them into the ground with this hammer. Later. Good job. Okay Krox, now calculate the angle that would be produced between a log of this length if I lean it between these two posts..... The krox would probably growl and start pounding more posts because it has NO CLUE what you mean. Similarly, telling a saurus to pound logs into the ground is probably equally futile, like trying to get a dog to climb a tree or a cat to herd sheep. It probably accounts for their low initiative that their just so one tracked, part of initiative is fancy finaggling in combat, dashing displays of tricksy stuff that's hard to see coming.... None of that for saurus, they just whack things with sticks in the straightest possible path.
.
