Generally, computational linguists study linguistic phenomenon by attempting to duplicate them with a computer, so as to confirm their hypothesis. (For example, if they believe that the grammar of a given language is G, then they will implement a parser for G, and see if that parser can accept all valid sentences in the language.)
Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models[?] of various kinds of linguistic phenomena.