Competence vs. Performance: Summary

Tue Oct 16 10:46:56 UTC 2007

Dear All,

It's been an interesting week on InfoCHILDES. My question about competence-performance produced a typically fascinating response (see below). More fascinating, perhaps, was the way my innocent query got diverted into two separate strands of discussion: one on the Legacy of Chomsky and one on the need for a pragmatics discussion forum. Matters snowballed, and, in the case of pragmatics, resulted in a potentially useful new resource for researchers in that area. All of which makes the following summary seem a little tame, but here goes (references listed below):

As I dimly knew, the competence-performance distinction is by no means universally accepted and is explicitly rejected in some quarters. The unwarranted limitations it imposes are widely acknowledged, even within the nativist camp (see, for example, Tom Roeper's comments to InfoCHILDES on October 15th 2007).

As usual, we find signs of Wheel Reinvention, starting with the well known fact that competence-performance was inspired by Saussure's (1916/1974) notions of langue and parole. Of course, there are differences: langue comprises a finite set of words and phrases, while parole is reserved for sentence formation (see Chomsky, 1972, pp19-20 for his take on Saussure). In a similar vein, Jessica Horst reminds us that, in the field of cognitive development, it has long been acknowledged that performance is highly context dependent, a phenomenon characterized by Piaget (1929) as horizontal décalage (see also recent work by Samuelson & Horst, in press).

Dissatisfaction with the competence-performance split is by no means new, as indicated by Kaufer (1979), Valian (1979) and Black & Chiat (1981). More recent signs of discomfort with competence-performance can be witnessed in Seidenberg & MacDonald (1999) and the comments offered by Joseph Stemberger (InfoCHILDES, October 14th 2007). According to one correspondent, at least one reviewer has argued that this topic is out-of-date, but just to prove that it does, in fact, still attract serious attention, we have the following: Samuelson, Horst, Dobbertin, & Schutte, (2006); Ambridge, Rowland & Pine (in press); Samuelson & Horst (in press); and Hoff (under review).

So what exactly is wrong with the competence-performance distinction? Well, I hope you'll forgive me for not being on top of this literature yet, but some of the headline points seem to be:

*      "In everyday usage, the notions of knowing and using a language seem inextricably bound" (Kaufer, 1979, p.257). To illustrate, Kaufer points out that one must strain hard to find cases of people using a language they do not know (reciting Latin prayers, perhaps) or, on the other hand, knowing a language they cannot use (e.g., some forms of aphasia). A similar point is also attributed by Stemberger to Fromkin: "assuming that performance is based on competence, we expect performance to reflect many aspects of competence" (InfoCHILDES, October 14th 2007)

*      We must include a real bugbear for empirically minded souls, and one that is very well rehearsed: "performance factors" can always be invoked to explain away awkward-shaped pearls that fall from children's mouths. If they don't fit the hypothesis under scrutiny they are rejected, seemingly on good grounds, but, of course, invoking performance in this way is not at all well motivated.

*      Another view: the competence-performance distinction relies on a particular account of adult grammar (Chomsky's) that is not to everyone's taste. If one rejects a Chomskyan version of grammar as the endpoint of development, then the competence-performance distinction is rendered redundant in the process (Ambridge, Rowland & Pine, in press).

*      One possible alternative is offered by McClelland & Bybee (in press), based on the notion of gradience, which they take to be "an inherent feature of language representation, processing, and learning" (McClelland & Bybee, in press, p.1). This view clashes with the traditional notion of grammatical competence in which a given utterance is either grammatical or ungrammatical.

*      Connectionist approaches also often clash with idealizations like competence, since the latter "excludes aspects of linguistic performance that are .... central to the structure of utterances" (Seidenberg & MacDonald, 1999, p.572). This point is exemplified by Hoff (under review) with her observation that social factors can affect the linguistic form of observed child speech output (for example, the contrast witnessed in two-year-olds' conversation with their own mothers versus a researcher).

As we can see, the massed ranks of InfoCHILDES do not hold out much hope for competence versus performance. No-one has stepped forward to defend the competence-performance distinction, or even to offer supportive references. So perhaps I should offer some ballast. We should not forget that speech-production mechanisms are, at least in some ways, physiologically and functionally separate from the mental plans that set them in motion. When we reach the level of the physical articulators (lips, tongue, vocal cords and so on), this point is undeniable. There is, then, always room for the physical aspects of speech production to cause speech errors, quite independent from variation introduced by other contextual factors that might influence the linguistic-mental intentions of the speaker. Put another way, some slips of the tongue, false starts, hesitations and other stumbles could be seen as performance errors and also as separate from the mental competence that initiated a given utterance. One problem is that this gives short shrift to speech-production mechanisms. Perhaps we should talk instead about two kinds of competence: one concerned with linguistic competence, the other with speech production competence. At some level, therefore, it may be proper to acknowledge a split between competence and performance, or competence in one domain from competence in another. Thus, Black & Chiat (1981, p.39) emphasise that "the primary function of the distinction was not that of differentiating underlying knowledge and actual behaviour, but that of isolating one particular type of knowledge from others." We might add that "a theory of knowledge does not entail a particular theory of use" (Valian, 1979, p.3). For Tom Roeper, the "theory of use" would seem to be intrinsically uninteresting and, incidentally, not well understood: the "original competence/performance distinction ...... has to do with a kind of performance that everyone is willing to exclude" (InfoCHILDES, October 15th 2007).

Nevertheless, the distinction persists (and as I observed in my first message, in many, many fields of academic enquiry). The fact that any such distinction throws up an empirical nightmare, in terms of tracing the origins of a given utterance back to its causes (and the interactions between them), would not, in itself, invalidate the conceptual integrity of a competence-performance (or competence-competence) distinction. I think what has altered since Chomsky (1965) is an added layer of conceptual complexity: the acknowledgement that an additional, and perhaps more interesting, source of linguistic variability stems, not from physical breakdowns, but from numerous other factors that could correctly be seen as part of the speaker's knowledge of language. These too, of course, create empirical headaches in trying to identify and explain what they are and how they function.

You will understand that any errors in this summary stem entirely from performance factors, not my underlying competence (cough). I look forward to tackling this literature properly and thank InfoCHILDES correspondents for whetting my appetite. But first, I must tidy out my filing cabinets (as promised). If I start now, I should be free some time in 2010......

Regards,

Matthew.

Thanks

Particular thanks are due to Ben Ambridge, Shula Chiat, Gedeon Deák, Erika Hoff, Jessica Horst, Evan Kidd, Jay McClelland, Tom Roeper, Joseph Stemberger and Virginia Valian.

References

Ambridge, B., Rowland, C.F. & Pine, J.M. (in press). Is structure dependence an innate constraint? New experimental evidence from children's complex-question production. Cognitive Science.

Black, M. & Chiat, S. (1981). Psycholinguistics without 'psychological reality'. Linguistics, 19, 37-61.

Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Hoff, E. (under review). Context effects on young children's language use: The influence of conversational setting and partner.

Kauffer, D. (1979). The competence/performance distinction in linguistic theory. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 9, 257-275.

McClelland, J.L. & Bybee, J. (in press). Gradience of gradience: A reply to Jackendoff. The Linguistic Review.

Piaget, J. (1929). The child's conception of the world. London: Routledge.

Samuelson, L.K., Horst, J.S., Dobbertin, B.N. & Schutte, A.R. (2006). Knowledge, performance, and task: Décalage and dynamics in young children's noun generalizations. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp720-725). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Samuelson, L. K. & Horst, J. S. (in press). Confronting complexity: Insights from the details of behavior over multiple timescales. Developmental Science.

Saussure, F. de (1916/1974). Course in general linguistics. London: Fontana/Collins.

Seidenberg, M. S., & MacDonald, M. C. (1999). A probabilistic constraints approach to language acquisition and processing. Cognitive Science, 23, 569-588.

Valian, V. (1979). The wherefores and therefores of the competence-performance distinction. In W.E. Cooper & E.C.T. Walker (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett. (pp1-26). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

*********************************************************************

Matthew Saxton MA, MSc, DPhil

School of Psychology and Human Development,

Institute of Education,

25 Woburn Square,

London,

WC1H 0AA.

U.K.

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7612 6509

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www.ioe.ac.uk <http://www.ioe.ac.uk> 

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