1. the ability to exert control over one’s life, to cope with specific problems effectively, and to make changes to one’s behavior and one’s environment, as opposed to the mere ability to adjust or adapt to circumstances as they are. Affirming, strengthening, or achieving a client’s competence is often a basic goal in psychotherapy.

2. one’s developed repertoire of skills, especially as it is applied to a task or set of tasks. A distinction is sometimes made between competence and performance, which is the extent to which competence is realized in one’s actual work on a problem or set of problems.

3. in linguistics and psycholinguistics, the nonconscious knowledge of the underlying rules of a language that enables individuals to speak and understand it. In this sense, competence is a rationalist concept that must be kept distinct from the actual linguistic performance of any particular speaker, which may be constrained by such nonlinguistic factors as memory, attention, or fatigue. Both terms were introduced by Noam Chomsky, who proposed the study of linguistic competence as the true task of linguistics; in doing so, he effectively declared linguistics to be a branch of cognitive psychology. See generative grammar; grammaticality; language acquisition device.

4. in law, the capacity to comprehend the nature of a transaction and to assume legal responsibility for one’s actions. See competency to stand trial. Compare incompetence. —competent adj.