Our ability to comprehend and produce language is one of humans’ most impressive skills, but it is not flawless. We must convey and interpret messages via a noisy channel in ever-changing contexts and we sometimes fail to access an optimal combination of words and grammatical constructions. Here, we extend the notion of good-enough (GN) comprehension to GN production, which allows us to unify a wide range of phenomena including overly vague word choices, agreement errors, resumptive pronouns, transfer effects, and children’s overextensions and regularizations. We suggest these all involve the accessing and production of a ‘GN’ option when a more-optimal option is inaccessible. The role of accessibility highlights the need to relate memory encoding and retrieval processes to language comprehension and production.

我们理解和产生语言的能力是人类最令人印象深刻的技能之一，但它并非完美无缺。我们必须在不断变化的环境中通过嘈杂的渠道传达和解释信息，有时我们无法获得单词和语法结构的最佳组合。在这里，我们将足够好的（GN）理解的概念扩展到 GN 生成，这使我们能够统一各种现象，包括过于模糊的单词选择、一致性错误、恢复代词、转移效应以及儿童的过度扩展和正则化。我们建议，当无法访问更优化的选项时，这些都涉及“GN”选项的访问和生成。可访问性的作用强调了将记忆编码和检索过程与语言理解和产生联系起来的必要性。