In approaches to linguistics which adopt this distinction, competence would normally be considered responsible for the fact that "I like ice cream" is a possible sentence of English, the particular proposition that it denotes, and the particular sequence of phones that it consists of.
[3] For example, many linguistic theories, particularly in generative grammar, give competence-based explanations for why English speakers would judge the sentence in (1) as odd.
[4][5] In general, performance-based explanations deliver a simpler theory of grammar at the cost of additional assumptions about memory and parsing.
[15] Another critique of the concept of linguistic competence is that it does not fit the data from actual usage where the felicity of an utterance often depends largely on the communicative context.
[16][17] Neurolinguist Harold Goodglass has argued that performance and competence are intertwined in the mind, since, "like storage and retrieval, they are inextricably linked in brain damage.
[20] Some researchers working on discourse reject the competence-performance distinction due to the difficulty of determining whether an utterance is well-formed or not and the fact that dialogue is inherently interactive.
In addition, children do not produce creative utterances about past experiences and future expectations because they have not had enough exposure to their target language to do so.
[25] Aphasia refers to a family of clinically diverse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language, or both, following brain damage.
The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics, is complexly interwoven with performance factors.
Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss.
The theory models and thus defines the concept of funniness and is formulated for an ideal speaker-hearer community i.e. for people whose senses of humor are exactly identical.