Competence VS Performance

COMPETENCE
Competence is a person’s underlying
(subconscious) linguistic ability to create and
understand sentences, including sentences they
have never heard before.

Competence refers to the knowledge that native

speakers have of their language as system of
abstract formal relations.
 PERFORMANCE
Performance is the real world linguistic
output.

Performance refers to what we do when we

speak or listen, that is, the infinite varied
individual acts of verbal behavior with their
irregularities, inconsistencies and errors.

May accurately reflect competence, but it also

may include speech errors.
 COMPETENCE vs PERFORMANCE
• Competence, being an ideal, is located as a
psychological or mental property. This is in
contrast to performance, which refers to an actual
event.

• Chomsky argues that only under an idealized

situation whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected
by grammatically irrelevant conditions such as
memory limitations and distractions will
performance be a direct reflection of competence.