ABSTRACT
This chapter defines linguistic competence as the unconscious knowledge of grammar which underlies language use by native and non-native speakers. A historical perspective is offered on earlier approaches to assessing linguistic competence, with a focus on offline tasks, particularly grammaticality/acceptability judgements. The relationship between representation and processing (or competence and performance) is addressed. Online versus offline tasks are compared and the advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed. Developments in the experimental investigation of a well-known linguistic phenomenon, reflexive binding, are used to illustrate how approaches to exploring linguistic competence have developed over time.
