I think cycling your ideas through language and back--like "rubber duck" debugging-- serves to:

1. The act of encoding a concept into particular words forces you to re-examine aspects of it which we're not getting attention.

2. Decoding it again helps you notice inconsistencies between what was looped-back versus and what was already held.

3. It recruits more parts of your brain, some of which otherwise slip into a sort of power-saving idle mode.