What term, in Chomsky’s theory, refers to the speaker’s idealized, underlying knowledge of their language structure?

💡 Explanation:

Noam Chomsky introduced the distinction between Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance. Competence refers to the idealized, intrinsic knowledge a native speaker has of their language's grammar (syntax, morphology, etc.). Performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations, which is often affected by non-linguistic factors like memory limitations, errors, and distractions.