 However, every linguist accepts that some idealization away from the speech phenomena is necessary. Emergentists and Externalists are almost always happy to idealize away from sporadic speech errors. What they are not so keen to do is to idealize away from limitations on linguistic processing and the short-term memory on which it relies. Acceptance of a thoroughgoing competence/performance distinction thus tends to be a hallmark of Essentialist approaches, which take the nature of language to be entirely independent of other human cognitive processes (though of course capable of connecting to them).