Competence vs. Performance: Summary

[Evan J Kidd]

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I don' t see how your example shows any support for the necessity of the competence-performance distinction. We have known for a long time that children don' t like to use relative clauses that modify main clause subjects. If your point is that children rarely hear them, then your data show that they also rarely use them, so at best, their ' competence'  is shaky, as indeed your one example from 

_________________________________ Dr Evan Kidd Lecturer in Psychology School of Psychological Sciences University of Manchester Oxford Road M13 9PL Manchester, UK Ph: +44 (0) 161 275 2578 Fax: +44 (0) 161 275 8587 http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk/staff/108727 __________________________________
From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of john limber Sent: 17 October 2007 12:30 To: Matthew Saxton; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: john limber Subject: Re: Competence vs. Performance: Summary

On 10/16/07 6:46 AM, "Matthew Saxton" <M.Saxton at ioe.ac.uk> wrote:
" No-one has stepped forward to defend the competence-performance distinction, or even to offer supportive references."
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 children' s utterances I observed -- a lack of relative clauses attached to subject NPs.  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." Inferences 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. Isthis 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. Anextensive 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." 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: " Well these buses that I've had today have been really weird." Child: " I think that the girl ... that's here ... doesn't ... she doesn't want me to open it. " 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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