Competence vs. Performance: Summary

[john limber]

On 10/16/07 6:46 AM, "Matthew Saxton" <M.Saxton at ioe.ac.uk> wrote:

>  ³No-one has stepped forward to defend the competence-performance distinction,
> or even to offer supportive references.²
> 
OK‹ try this‹with references too!

  The basic idea is so widespread in science that it hardly needs defense‹
frictionless bodies, stimulus generalization, latent learning, stereotype
bias.... and linguistic competence all are more or less scientific concepts
designed to variously explain conditional performance.

  Does anyone really doubt that the language one observes is but a subset of
the language one might observe under such and such conditions?  And that
much of that observed language is fragmentary and ill-formed?  While every
case demands its own explanatory story, to toss out the whole idea of
competence or similar concepts sounds like a lame return to behaviorism.

Years ago I spent a lot of time on the development of complex sentences
(Limber, 1973). There was one gap in the thousands of two to three year old
children¹s utterances I observed -- a lack of relative clauses attached to
subject NPs. 
 
Did this mean these kids didn¹t have the potential for those structures in
their behavioral repertoire‹their linguistic competence? Here¹s the abstract
of my answer (Limber, 1976)‹which curiously in connection with this current
discussion, involves pragmatics.

³Inferences about linguistic competence in children are typically based on
spontaneous speech.
    This poses a problem since we know that other factors are also involved
in speech production.
    Children who may use complex object and adverbial NPs do not use complex
subject NPs.  Is
    this a competence deficit, a performance problem, or simply a reflection
of pragmatic factors?
    Evidence presented here suggests that children probably do not need
complex subjects.  An
    extensive use of pronouns in subject but not object position indicates
that pragmatics may
    account for the distribution of clauses in their speech. A similar
pattern in adult speech indicates there is no warrant to conclude children's
lack of subject clauses reflects anything more than the nature of
spontaneous speech.²

 
In fact, in all my data of several thousand utterances of children and
adults, only TWO subject NPs showed up‹one shaky example from a three-year
old and another from an adult.  The probability that a child is exposed to a
subject NP is, from my data, less than 1/1000.  Here are the two:
 
Adult: ³Well these buses that I've had today have been really weird.²
 
Child: ³I think that the girl ... that's here ... doesn't ... she doesn't
want me to open it. ³
 
I wonder how the Nuevo-Statistical approaches to language acquisition would
handle this?
 
 
 
Limber, J. (1973). The genesis of complex sentences. In T. Moore (Ed.),
Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language (pp. 169-186). New
York: Academic Press.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/JLimber/Genesis_complex_sentences.pdf
 
Limber, J. (1976). Unravelling competence, performance, and pragmatics in
the speech of young children. Journal of Child Language, 3, 309-318.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/JLimber/pragmatics_performance.pdf

John Limber
University of New Hampshire
Durham NH
 
 
 
 
 
I think that the girl ... that's here ...
doesn't ... she doesn't want me to open it.
 
Well these 
buses that I've had today have been really weird.
 
 
 
> 


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