Does it link words to pictures in your mind? So there is a mapping from the word “owl” to a picture of an owl in your head?
Can I also add that I don’t think this mapping involves word definitions, so for example the word owl won’t map to the word definition of an owl since you need to define words in the definition itself. This causes a never ending chain as you keep having to define words in further definitions.
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You gotta think of your brain like a file cabinet that stores all the words you know and has files on the things that a make a word have a meaning. This includes relationships between words/ideas, sensory info, similar words or things, sounds, usages, and all that. Then there’s pathways that form between what you hear/see and where the file is stored in the mind. The word owl would definitely map to the definition of an owl (big, nocturnal, hunter, wise, feathery, bird, bitey, 360 head spin) unless you didn’t know what an owl was, in which case you’d maybe try and figure out if an owl if something that sounds like the word ‘owl’, find a word that sounds similar and maybe come up with a wrong definition and start to build inaccurate files on it.
I don’t know if this is allowed, but the non ELI5 word for this is psycholinguistic processing and it relates to the way words are stored and retrieved in the mind.
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