Bring out the difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance?

Answer 1

The concept is very simple really. Linguistic competence is what you actually know about a language, and linguistic performance is how you actually use it. So if you make grammatical mistakes, but you know they are mistakes, then your performance does not match your competence. But if you don't know they are mistakes, then your competence matches your performance, and you are probably not native.

For example, in looking at the unanswered wiki questions close to this one:

How does pneumonia fit into Maslow theory?

If the questioner just made a type and knows that a native English speaker would say:

How does pneumonia fit into Maslow's theory

then his or her performance does not reflect his/her competence. If the questioner doesn't know that this is a grammatical error, then they lack linguistic competence in English.

Answer 2

Linguistic competence refers to a person's underlying knowledge of language rules and structures, while linguistic performance refers to actual language use in context. Competence is the idealized understanding of language, while performance can be influenced by factors such as memory limitations, distractions, or processing speed. Mistakes in performance do not necessarily indicate a lack of competence.