The DOI matches its Crossref record; 38 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124 · Cited by 28,810
Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity
Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1980) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.7350657 · Cited by 4,888
The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution
MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.101.4.676 · Cited by 2,259
Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association
Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1984) · Nature · doi:10.1038/307161a0 · Cited by 2,218
Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly
Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P. J. (1992) · Journal of Memory and Language · doi:10.1016/0749-596x(92)90039-z · Cited by 1,856
Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(82)90008-1 · Cited by 1,767
The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/0010-0277(78)90002-1 · Cited by 1,400
Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968) · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · Cited by 1,215
Good-Enough Representations in Language Comprehension
Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferraro, V. (2002) · Current Directions in Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00158 · Cited by 1,147
Self-citationBounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox
Sent, E.-M. (2002) · Journal of Economic Issues · doi:10.1080/00213624.2002.11506464 · Cited by 1,059
Cited by
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension?
Kuperberg, G. R., & Jaeger, T. F. (2016) · Language, Cognition and Neuroscience · doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1102299 · Cited by 1,087
Why would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis
Patel, A. D. (2011) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00142 · Cited by 703
Brouwer, H., Fitz, H., & Hoeks, J. (2012) · Brain Research · doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2012.01.055 · Cited by 625
Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment
Dąbrowska, E. (2012) · Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · doi:10.1075/lab.2.3.01dab · Cited by 423
Language style matching in writing: synchrony in essays, correspondence, and poetry.
Ireland, M. E., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0020386 · Cited by 380
Metadata
- Authors
- Ferreira, F., & Patson, N. D.
- Venue
- Language and Linguistics Compass
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2007-03
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1-2
- Pages
- 71-83
- ISSN
- 1749-818X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1967852455
- Cited by
- 730
- References
- 38
- FWCI
- 5.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The ‘Good Enough’ Approach to Language Comprehension. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00007.x
- The paper
- Ferreira, F., & Patson, N. D. (2007). The ‘Good Enough’ Approach to Language Comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00007.x
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
