The ‘Good Enough’ Approach to Language Comprehension

Abstract

Ferreira and colleagues argued that the language comprehension system creates syntactic and semantic representations that are merely ‘good enough’ (GE) given the task that the comprehender needs to perform. GE representations contrast with ones that are detailed, complete, and accurate with respect to the input. In this article, we review the original argument for GE processing, and we present new evidence that supports the concept: first, local interpretations are computed, which can interfere with global ones; second, new findings based on the recording of event-related potentials show the use of simple heuristics rather than compositional algorithms for constructing sentence meaning; and recent studies show that the comprehension system has mechanisms for handling disfluencies, but they work imperfectly. We argue that the GE approach to language comprehension is similar to the use of fast and frugal heuristics for decision-making, and that future research should explore this connection more thoroughly.