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Hello, everyone.<br>
<br>
Just to start, I'd like to mention that I've spent all of my career
working on speech errors in adults (both spontaneous speech and
experimental tasks), and so I accept the notion that there are outputs
that are "correct" but that performance factors can lead to "incorrect"
outputs. But that doesn't mean that "the" competence-performance
distinction gets us anywhere practical.<br>
<br>
Defenses of "the" competence-performance distinction are missing two
main
points: <br>
(1) that the exact division between what is competence and what is
performance, as well as the criteria that distinguish them, are largely
unknown after more than 40 years.<br>
(2) There is no clear way to test competence except through performance.<br>
<br>
Consider John Limber's quote:<br>
"Inferences about linguistic competence in children are typically based
on spontaneous speech. <br>
This poses a problem since we know that other factors are also
involved in speech production."<br>
<br>
Well, yes, there are performance factors in language production.<br>
Just as there are performance factors in language perception, language
comprehension, grammaticality judgments, etc.<br>
In the real world, we can observe only performance, and all acts of any
sort are "contaminated" by performance.<br>
And it follows from that that inferences about competence must come
from performance, only and always.<br>
<br>
<br>
OK, so now let's get concrete.<br>
Observe a native speaker of English of any age for long enough, and you
will find them saying *SPINNED instead of SPUN.<br>
Ask them about it, and they'll tell you that it was an error.<br>
In typical speeded experimental situations, undergraduates produce such
errors about 4% of the time in neutral contexts.<br>
(And in an experiment that I'm just finishing up, where they produce
coordinated verbs, the error GRINNED AND *SPINNED (with rhyming regular
in the first word) shoots up to about 25% of tokens.)<br>
Young children produce such outputs from an early age, but every study
has shown that such overregularizations are in the minority for most
children (and most irregular verbs) from the beginning, and that, like
in adult speech, the frequency of the verb is one of the predictors of
error rate.<br>
This is a generally viewed as a performance phenomenon at all ages.<br>
But yet it is cited all the time as a nice deomstration that patterns
are being extracted and generalized.<br>
<br>
At the same time, speakers will also occasionally produce, instead of
SPUN, *SPAN. In experimental situations, such errors are easy to come
by.<br>
As well as things like *GRUN instead of regular GRINNED. (In that
experiment that I'm just finishing up, *GRUN occurs about 2% of the
time in neutral contexts, <br>
rising to about 6% in SPUN AND *GRUN (with a rhyming irregular in the
first word).)<br>
Bybee & Moder 1983 showed that irregular patterns generalize to
novel words at much greater rates.<br>
So irregular patterns also show generalization.<br>
<br>
Consider another of John's quotes:<br>
"Does anyone really doubt that the language one observes is but a
subset of the language one might observe under such and such
conditions?"<br>
<br>
So, if we MUST conclude that competence extracts and encapsulates
explicit procedures (such as rules) to occount for generalization, then
competence contains such procedures for creating both regular and
irregular forms, because both types of patterns overgeneralize, right?<br>
<br>
Steve Pinker, Harald Clausen, and others taking a similar approach,
have argued that the overgeneralization of the -<i>ed</i> pattern
involves the use of a rule after failure to access an irregular form,
but that overregularization of irregular patterns is a performance
phenomenon, based on the way that irregular forms are stored in and
accessed from the lexicon.<br>
Which leads to the conclusion that generalization of patterns can occur
for performance reasons, even in approaches that accept "the"
competence-performance distinction.<br>
<br>
Which leads to this possibility:<br>
all inflected forms that a speaker has been been exposed to are simply
stored in the lexicon.<br>
All generalization, even of regular patterns, is a performance
phenomenon.<br>
And while it's true that the -<i>ED</i> pattern overgeneralizes more
than any other pattern, we could attribute <i>that</i> difference to
performance factors, right?<br>
<br>
Or even<br>
The purpose of a grammar is to enumerate the sentences of the language.<br>
Actual grammars consist of storing every sentence that has ever been
observed.<br>
Generalization is just a performance phenomenon across stored exemplars.<br>
You want to know in detail how generalization occurs?<br>
Hey, that's a performance phenomenon. It lies outside the proper bounds
of linguistic theory, and so it's not my responsibility to show how it
works.<br>
<br>
And what I personally would want to see is some formal proof that "the"
competence-performance distinction couldn't lead us to that sort of
system just as easily as it has led us anywhere else.<br>
<br>
>From a practical perspective, it seems to me that, since we have to
work with performance data anyway, we want to work with as wide a range
of types of data as possible. <br>
And we want to develop theories that account for all of those data, in
detail.<br>
If there's a distinction between competence and performance, that's
fine, but it has to be explicit, and our theories need to explain
exactly which phenomena are due to competence, which are due to
performance, and why. And if there are aspects of data that aren't
accounted for in detail, it means that we should be uncomfortable,
because we need to account for it all.<br>
<br>
That isn't the way that "the" competence-performance distinction has
been used in the past.<br>
If it had been, that would've been fine, as far as I'm concerned.<br>
While some theoretical linguists feel it's fine to apply linguistic
theory to child language, few are open to using child language to
provide the tie-breaker for choosing between two theoretical
mechanisms. <br>
<br>
In the meantime, I'll happily go on studying performance and working on
theories of how human language works, including claims about the
fundamental orgainization of the language system.<br>
<br>
As should we all.<br>
<br>
<br>
---Joe Stemberger<br>
Linguistics<br>
UBC<br>
<br>
<br>
john limber pravi:
<blockquote cite="mid:C33B6A93.4281%25limber@comcast.net" type="cite">
<title>Re: Competence vs. Performance: Summary</title>
<font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br>
On 10/16/07 6:46 AM, "Matthew Saxton" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:M.Saxton@ioe.ac.uk"><M.Saxton@ioe.ac.uk></a> wrote:<br>
<br>
</span></font>
<blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><span
style="font-size: 16px;"> “No-one has stepped forward to defend the
competence-performance distinction, or even to offer supportive
references.”<br>
<br>
</span></font></blockquote>
<font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span style="font-size: 17px;">OK—
try this—with references too!<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br>
</span><span style="font-size: 17px;"> 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. <br>
</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br>
</span><span style="font-size: 17px;"> 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. <br>
<br>
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 children’s utterances I observed -- a lack of relative clauses
attached to subject NPs. <br>
<br>
Did this mean these kids didn’t have the potential for those structures
in their behavioral repertoire—their linguistic competence? Here’s the
abstract of my answer (Limber, 1976)—which curiously in connection with
this current discussion, involves pragmatics.<br>
</span><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br>
</span><font size="2"><span style="font-size: 14px;">“Inferences
about linguistic competence in children are typically based on
spontaneous speech. <br>
This poses a problem since we know that other factors are also
involved in speech production. <br>
Children who may use complex object and adverbial NPs do not use
complex subject NPs. Is<br>
this a competence deficit, a performance problem, or simply a
reflection of pragmatic factors? <br>
Evidence presented here suggests that children probably do not need
complex subjects. An<br>
extensive use of pronouns in subject but not object position
indicates that pragmatics may <br>
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.”<br>
</span></font><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br>
</span><font size="2"><span style="font-size: 14px;"> <br>
</span></font><span style="font-size: 16px;">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:<br>
<br>
Adult: “</span></font><span style="font-size: 16px;"><font
face="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial">Well these buses that I've had today
have been really weird.”<br>
<br>
Child: “I think that the girl ... that's here ... doesn't ... she
doesn't want me to open it. “<br>
<br>
I wonder how the Nuevo-Statistical approaches to language acquisition
would handle this?<br>
<br>
</font></span><font face="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"><font size="2"><span
style="font-size: 14px;"> <br>
<br>
</span></font></font><font
face="Lucida Grande, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span
style="font-size: 17px;">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.<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://pubpages.unh.edu/%7Ejel/JLimber/Genesis_complex_sentences.pdf">http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/JLimber/Genesis_complex_sentences.pdf</a><br>
<br>
Limber, J. (1976). Unravelling competence, performance, and pragmatics
in the speech of young children. Journal of Child Language, 3, 309-318.<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://pubpages.unh.edu/%7Ejel/JLimber/pragmatics_performance.pdf">http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/JLimber/pragmatics_performance.pdf</a><br>
<br>
John Limber<br>
University of New Hampshire<br>
Durham NH<br>
</span></font><font size="2"><font face="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"><span
style="font-size: 14px;"> <br>
<br>
</span></font><span style="font-size: 14px;"><font
face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"> <br>
</font></span></font><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span
style="font-size: 17px;"> <br>
<br>
</span></font><font size="2"><font face="Helvetica, Verdana, Arial"><span
style="font-size: 14px;">I think that the girl ... that's here ... <br>
doesn't ... she doesn't want me to open it. <br>
<br>
Well these <br>
buses that I've had today have been really weird. <br>
<br>
</span></font><font face="Times, Times New Roman"><span
style="font-size: 13px;"> <br>
</span></font></font><font face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span
style="font-size: 18px;"> <br>
</span></font>
<blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><span
style="font-size: 16px;"><br>
</span></font></blockquote>
<font face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><br>
</span></font>
</blockquote>
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