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Impossible figures like the Penrose triangle feel wrong because vision cannot build a coherent object. The paper argues the same for language: when tangled sentences cause similar confusion, we don’t trigger a pure grammar module, but communicative skills that judge them not worth the effort.

Lay Summary Sometimes in scientific progress, something that seems obvious and common sense turns out to be ‘upside down’. One famous example is the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth: this initially seems like common sense but scientific discovery showed that actually the Earth revolves around the Sun.

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