SOME COMMENTS ON COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

George A. Miller
f Department o Psychology The Rockefeller University New York. New York 10021

If you are ever asked to be a discussant, Ill tell you how you d o it. You go off and gather your own thoughts; then you hope that somebody says something that will make one of those thoughts relevant to the occasion. It will turn out that some of the things Ill have to say now will be relevant to what youve already heard, but thats just my good luck. How can we best understand the notion of linguistic competence in order to account for linguistic performance? In collecting my thoughts about competence and performance, I began with a strong suspicion that these words mean different things to different people, and that much of the disagreement that this distinction has inspired in recent years could be understood if we thought in terms of people who believed they were talking about the same thing but really werent. So, as a first step, I began listing alternative uses of the terms competence and performance. Without even trying very hard, 1 got up to eight different versions of the distinction. I will review them for you briefly. Two of them, 1 believe, are historically established. At the time Chomsky formulated his version, and cast it in terms of competence and performance, these were precedents that he could (and in fact did) cite. The principle precedent was a linguistic one. Sometime before 1910 de Saussure had distinguished between langueandparole, i.e., language and acts of speaking, in terms of a distinction between a social norm and individual manifestations of that norm. His purpose was to give primacy to the study of language as a way to unify a diverse range of physical, social, and psychological facts. Ive always wondered to what extent de Saussure was influenced by the sociological distinction, current in Paris in those days, between collective representation and individual representation. But I dont know any historian of science who has dug into that. Another precedent that existed was what I would call a rognifive version. Lashley, as early as 1929, and Tolman many times through the 1930s, distinguished knowledge and performance in terms of what an organism had learned versus what he might be motivated to d o with his knowledge on any particular occasion. That is, a rat could have learned where the food bin was and, in some sense of the word know, could know where the food bin was, but not go there if he wasnt hungry. 1 think their purpose was to deepen some rather superficial behavioristic theories that were popular in their day by introducing theoretical variables that could not be directly observed in the behavior but, perhaps, could be abstracted or inferred from it. Chomskys inspiration was largely from Saussure, but he was aware of the cognitive distinction as well, and I think he tried to subsume them both in his own view of the matter. 1 would call Chomskys view a rafionalistic view of the distinction. This distinction was initially developed in our chapters in the Handbook o Mathf ematical Psychology ( 1963). In those chapters Chomsky distinguished between competence and performance, between the language that a person knows and the speech acts that a language user performs. This was done in terms roughly analogous to the distinction between, say, an axiom system and various realizations of such a system.

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This made the problem of providing grammars of a particular language comparable to the problem of providing an axiom system. Consequently, this led to a peculiar relation between what you can observe and the theory youre talking about. You cant test a grammar in terms of errors committed by any particular language user on any particular occasion, just as you cant test an axiom system in terms of the errors someone makes in applying it. The point is that Chomskys rationalistic formulation, 1 think, captured both the linguistic and the cognitive distinctions, and at the time it seemed to be a significant advance in theorizing. Since then there has been, as were all well aware here, a great deal of discussion of this distinction and attempts to invoke it in one way or another in other areas. There is a version that I think of as deve/npmenta/, because its frequently observed that children can understand linguistic constructions that they dont use spontaneously. Among students of child language its become fashionable to phrase this observation in terms of the childrens competence exceeding their performance. I dont like this usage. The source of this disparity is probably the fact that the listeners task is easier than the speakers; so this developmental view seems to make competence equal to listening and performance equal to speaking, which certainly was not my understanding of what was involved. This view is related to a view that 1 would call a sifuufionulversion of competence. It is frequently observed that performance varies according to the situational context. A child may, in a school situation, seem to be totally incompetent and then, put into a certain play situation, may demonstrate that he really did have all the relevant knowledge, after all. Consequently, this has led some psychologists to distinguish two kinds of competence; that which is the basic knowledge of the language itself and some other kind of competence that has to d o with the competence of using this basic knowledge in particular situations. On the other hand, there are the views of those who are critical, not just of the competence-performance distinction but of the whole way in which Chomsky tried to formulate a theory of competence. Let me call this the critical version. These people, the critics, tend, I think correctly, to see this distinction as a defense of mentalism. Now, if you reject the implication that the competence-performance distinction is mentalistic, then it just seems to boil down to the traditional, and rather uninteresting distinction, between a theory and the data. Viewed in this way, if thats your view of it, what Chomsky seems to be saying is that his axiomatic kind of grammatical theory is impervious to any kind of disproof by empirical observation, since the language users deviations from the theory can be dismissed as computational errors, or perhaps the experiment can be dismissed as being irrelevant to the theoretical question. Since a theory that cant be tested is worthless, many critics rejected the distinction and, along with it, the theory that inspired it. Another view of the distinction is one I would call methodological. The fact is that transformational and generative linguistic theories are nof immune to test. Their frequent revisions are evidence that they can be tested and revised. The problem was that the tests relied on linguistic intuition as data. So some workers ( I think its fair to say that T. G. Bever takes a line at least parallel to this) defended a reformulated version of the competence-performance distinction: Theories of competence were distinguished from theories of performance in terms of a reliance on linguistic intuitions versus a reliance on empirical and experimental observations. Intuitive judgments are certainly mentalistic, so that aspect of the original distinction is preserved. Nevertheless, the methodological version shifts the battleground to what I consider a n even less interesting piece of real estate. Since linguists use intuitive judgments as data and psycholinguists use experiments as data, this seems to suggest

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that the competence-performance distinction is identical to the distinction between linguists and psycholinguists, a view that Dr. McNeill disavowed, I believe. My eighth and last version is the notion that competence and performance are autonomous. It seems that the next step would be to abandon any effort to characterize the relation between competence and performance. Linguistics has its goals and its methods; psychology has its goals and methods. They are just two different ways of looking at the same thing, much as a logician and a psychologist might both have useful but unrelated things to say about reasoning. Since they are autonomous sciences, we shouldnt expect either to verify the theories of the other. I think this view preserves, in a rather unattractive form, the observation that misuse cannot invalidate an axiom system. There are probably many other versions of the competence-performance distinction. But since any number larger than seven is effectively infinite to me, I gave up that approach and tried to think instead about my own ideas of what the distinction should be. Fortunately, Zenon Pylyshyn has written an article called The Role of Competence Theories in Cognitive Psychology that was published in the Journal o Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 2, no. 1, in 1973, that expresses my opinf ion better than I could. Its a rather long article, so I cant read it to you. But I can recommend that if you have a serious interest in my views of the competenceperformance distinction, you should read Pylyshyns article. There is a part of his article that seems to me to give the correct answer to the question that this mornings speakers were asked to answer, so Im going to take the liberty of summarizing that part of it for you. Pylyshyn points out that a competence theory, in Chomskys sense, can be thought of as a machine that computes a certain recursive function. If there is one machine that can compute this function, there must be a n infinite variety of machines that could compute it. So one problem the theorist faces is to characterize the simplest machine that can d o it. The criteria that a theorist will use in selecting what he considers to be the simplest, most parsimonious, best-integrated, and esthetically most pleasing machine, are not easy to capture. But the point he makes, and that I would like to endorse, is that what this means is that one must not make too much of the exact form of the competence theory in the related task of building a broader psychological theory. This is really rather obvious, but the failure to recognize this point has led to confusion among psychologists about the role of competence theory in the construction of a broader theory of cognition. Indeed, the linguists have caused some of this confusion by the way they have talked about the relation. For example, Saussure, in his famous distinction between language and acts of speaking writes as follows: But what is language? It is not to be confused with human speech, of which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. If the phrase a definite part is not misleading, it is at least ambiguous. Chomsky often speaks in a similar way. In 1965, in Aspects-I think this has already been quoted by Dr. Salzinger-he wrote that, No doubt, a reasonable model of language use will incorporate, as a basic component, the generative grammar that expresses the speaker-hearers knowledge of the language. Here the phrase is incorporate the generative grammar as a basic component. Dr. Langendoen, our one certified linguist in the group this morning, again reaffirmed this position that a theory of competence is a component of an idealized theory of linguistic performance. It is at this point that Pylyshyn says, If the suggestion is that a model of the language user must, in describing a wider data base, also account for the type of struc-

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ture captured by the generative grammar, then we are in agreement. If, on the other hand, it is meant t o suggest that a model of the language user must in some corner of the model contain a context-free rewriting system generating a base component in a given sequence (from S to a terminal string) followed temporally by the application of cyclically ordered transformation, then we must disagree. I think even Dr. Langendoen disagrees. The point is that the form of the grammar is settled on for very good reasons, but for reasons that d o not attempt to take account of any data other than primary linguistic intuitions. If the grammar had been developed to account for these data plus other evidence, it would probably have taken a very different form. A theory that is most parsimonious in describing data X can take a very different form from a theory that is most parsimonious in describing data X and data Y. So, Pylyshyn concludes, This argument suggests that the development of a more general theory of cognition should proceed by attempting to account for the structure which is the output of a competence theory, together with the other kinds of psychological evidence, rather than to incorporate the competence theory as formulated. As someone who spent several years trying to incorporate Chomskys theory of competence, as formulated at that time, into a theory of performance, I must say in my own defense that it was a n approach we had to try. The fact that you cant simply tack a psychological tail onto a syntactic kite was not initially obvious-it was something we had to learn by trying to d o it. My own version of this insight was that a linguistic theory of competence is not a component of, but an abstraction f r o m the cognitive theory that I wanted to construct. But the sense I give to this phrase, an abstraction from, is very similar to that expressed by Pylyshyn, since I want a theory that will account both for the linguistic intuitions and for many other psychological facts. So, the answer to the question How can we best understand the notion of linguistic competence in order to account for linguistic performance? is very simple. The exact form of the competence theory should not concern us too much. It may change next month. But the data it accounts for must also be accounted for in our broader psychological theories. In that sense we should understand it as setting some of the central problems that a broader theory must account for. To those who complain that Chomskys theory of competence has not solved all our problems, I would certainly give strong support. But then I would add that we wouldnt even have known what our problems were without Chomskys theory to guide us. It should be obvious that the more data a theory must account for, the more complicated the theory is going to be. I believe that our optima1 strategy, however, is the same as the strategy pursued so successfully in theoretical linguistics: to formulate a competence theory that accounts for more data, particularly for data relating to the temporal aspects of speech production and perception. This broader competence theory should also be formulated as a machine that can compute a certain recursive function, but one that comes close to representing actual cognitive processes while still accounting for the data that the transformational generative grammars account for. This will clearly be a much more difficult theoretical task. It may take a long time to discover how to d o it. If we are so lucky as to succeed, however, and if 1 should live long enough to see it--I will be personally very interested to see whether or not linguists will also adopt the broader model. That should be the real test of whether theoretical linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology.