A psycholinguist aims to evaluate a multilingual learner's true syntactic…
2026
A psycholinguist aims to evaluate a multilingual learner's true syntactic competence, distinct from observed errors in immediate production tasks. The most effective assessment strategy requires utilizing comprehensive data sources including:
Answer: C. Naturalistic speech analysis — Concept — competence versus performance. Syntactic competence is the internalised system of grammatical rules a speaker actually possesses; performance is the…
- A.
Rote grammatical drills
- B.
Timed cloze procedures
- C.
Naturalistic speech analysis
- D.
Error correction checklists
Attempted by 7 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept — competence versus performance. Syntactic competence is the internalised system of grammatical rules a speaker actually possesses; performance is the observable output that system produces on one particular occasion. Performance is always filtered through time pressure, memory load, anxiety, attention and the format of the task itself, so an error in output is not by itself evidence of a gap in the underlying grammar.
Application to this learner. For a multilingual learner, immediate production tasks add extra filters — the two language systems are both active, and the learner must inhibit one while retrieving from the other. Slips, self-corrections and code-switches produced under that load are performance phenomena. To reach the grammar behind them the psycholinguist needs data that are extended (long enough to contain complex structures), self-initiated (the learner, not the task, chooses what to build), contextualised (real communicative purpose) and repeated across occasions and settings, so that momentary factors average out and stable patterns stand out.
Contrasting the available data sources by what each yields:
Data source | What the record yields |
|---|---|
Rote grammatical drills | A cued frame is supplied and the learner completes it, so the record shows reproduction of practised forms in one controlled task type. |
Timed cloze procedures | Deletions must be filled against a clock, so the record is shaped by retrieval speed and working-memory load at that moment. |
Error correction checklists | An observer tallies surface deviations noticed during a performance, so the record is a frequency count of marked error types. |
Naturalistic speech analysis | Extended spontaneous talk is recorded in ordinary settings on several occasions, so the record contains the sentence structures the learner builds while communicating meaning. |
Cross-check. Apply the competence/performance test to each record: a drill, a timed cloze and an error tally all fix the task and constrain the output, so each measures the learner under one imposed condition. A corpus of spontaneous speech gathered repeatedly lets the analyst look for systematic regularities — consistent word order, agreement, tense marking, embedding and clause linking — and see whether a structure that breaks down on one occasion is produced correctly elsewhere, which marks that lapse as performance rather than a gap in the grammar. Because a learner may avoid a structure or simply never have occasion to use it, a form that is missing from the samples is treated as a lead to follow up with elicited production, comprehension or acceptability-judgement data, not as proof that the rule is absent from the grammar. This corpus-based evidence base is the classic method of language-acquisition research, from Brown's longitudinal studies onward.
Result. The most effective strategy is naturalistic speech analysis: spontaneous, extended, repeatedly sampled language use, which allows the learner’s underlying syntactic system to be inferred rather than only their moment-to-moment output to be scored.