Levels of specificity

• Semiotic competence is the capacity of semiosis, i.e. to learn and use a sign system for cognitive and communicative purposes.
  Semiotic competence is for the most part innate to a person.
• Language-specific competence is the mastery of the system of a particular language.
  Language-specific competence presupposes semiotic competence and is acquired entirely through learning.

Cognitive levels

• Procedural competence is a bundle of capacities and skills in a specific domain. Procedural language competence is consequently the ability to think and communicate in a language.
• Reflective competence is the capacity to control procedural competence in a certain domain. Reflective language competence is consequently the ability to reflect upon language activity and, e.g., to explain to somebody else how it works.

Two types of memory

• Procedural memory stores routines of actions and processes that we master or that run automatically in us.
• Declarative memory stores propositional knowledge.

Active and passive language competence

• Passive language competence or receptive competence is the ability to understand utterances.
• Active language competence or productive competence is the ability to produce and convey utterances.
• Mediative competence is the ability to convert messages from one language into another.

Asymmetric relationship between active and passive language competence:

• For any language, passive competence properly and completely includes its active competence.
• In language acquisition, passive language competence precedes active competence.
• In phylogeny, the sensory and analytic capacities underlying the semiotic faculty are developed earlier than the pertinent motor and synthetic capacities.