What term refers to the intuitive knowledge about a language that enables use?

What term refers to the intuitive knowledge about a language that enables use?

• A. Competence
• B. Chunk
• C. Cognate
• D. Connectionism

Answer: (A)

The intuitive knowledge that enables you to use a language is called competence. It refers to the internalized rules, patterns, and sense of how a language can be used—the mental grammar that lets you form and understand sentences, including ones you’ve never heard before. This knowledge is often tacit, so you can judge grammaticality and generate novel utterances without consciously articulating every rule. This contrasts with performance, which is how you actually speak or understand in real situations and can be influenced by memory or context.

A chunk would be a memorized phrase or set expression, not the general system of rules and knowledge that underpins all language use. A cognate is a word in another language that shares an origin with a word in your language. Connectionism is a theory about how language knowledge might be represented in networks, not the label for the intuitive knowledge itself.