STEVEN WALCZAK A CONTEXT-BASED COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION BY INFANTS AND CHILDREN ABSTRACT. This research attempts to understand how children learn to use language. Instead of using syntax-based grammar rules to model the differences between children’s language and adult language, as has been done in the past, a new model is proposed. In the new research model, children acquire language by listening to the examples of speech that they hear in their environment and subsequently use the speech examples that have been previously heard in similar contextual situations. A computer model is generated to simulate this new model of language acquisition. The MALL computer program will ‘listen’ to examples of human speech, as would occur around a child, and then try to use these examples in new situations that are similar to the contextual situations in which the language examples were ‘heard’. This will provide a better understanding of how children learn to use language and how educators can assist or improve the language learning process by providing required examples of speech or by helping children to develop a better understanding of similarities between various contexts. KEY WORDS: analogy, context-based learning, language acquisition 1. INTRODUCTION Pinker (1990) claims that language acquisition is one of the most important research topics in cognitive science and this has been followed by a resurgence in artificial intelligence natural language processing research (Brill and Mooney, 1997). Acquisition of native language vocabulary is singularly important in the development of a child’s learning abilities (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1989). By the time that most children start attending school, they can already speak in more or less syntactically correct utterances. It is during their secondary education that they are introduced to the formalization of language via syntactic grammars. In the field of linguistics and in the artificial intelligence domain of natural Foundations of Science 7: 393–411, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.