Computer programs so far have not fared well in modeling language acquisition. For one thing, learning methodology appli- cable in general domains does not readily lend itself in the linguistic domain. For another, linguistic representation used by language processing systems is not geared to learning. We intro- duced a new linguistic representation, the Dynamic Hierarchical Phrasal Lexicon (DHPL) [Zernik88], to facilitate language ac- quisition. From this, a language learning model was implement- ed in the program RINA, which enhances its own lexical hierar- chy by processing examples in context. We identified two tasks: First, how linguistic concepts are acquired from training exam- ples and organized in a hierarchy; this task was discussed in previous papers [Zernik87]. Second, we show ...

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