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This dissertation focuses on the unique aspects of Maltese morphology brought about by its genetic and geographic history. The experiments conducted and described here build on past research in Indo-European languages and new research in other Semitic languages to determine how different word formation systems function. Applying experimental techniques to the study of Maltese is crucial for two reasons. First, though Maltese is a Semitic language, recent extensive contact with English has greatly impacted its vocabulary and the structure of its verbs. Though the effects of persistent language contact is pervasive, clear and systematic differences may be observed between native Semitic verbs and those borrowed from English. Secondly, unlike other Semitic languages, the Maltese writing system uses the Roman alphabet. This allows for tests that require the reading of written stimuli to be performed in the same writing system as previous studies in Indo-European languages, eliminating a number of confounding factors.A masked priming experiment asked Maltese speakers to judge whether or not test items were words of their language. The test items included real and nonce verbs of both Semitic and English origin. Accuracy rates and reaction time were recorded and compared across speakers. The results of this experiment support the psychological salience of the consonantal root as a unit of lexical organization.An elicitation experiment asked native speakers of Maltese to provide a verb form that corresponded to a given noun or adjective. The test items were nouns of Semitic and English origin and non-words constructed to resemble such nouns. Responses were broadly transcribed and analyzed for their similarity to the expected patterns. The results show that speakers are able to use two morphological strategies to form new words. The factors affecting the choice between morphological systems include linguistic structure and social variables.Collectively, this pair of experiments indicate that the consonantal root is a viable morphological and psychological unit of lexical organization, supporting a search-based approach to lexical access. Furthermore, speakers are able to form new words on the basis of whole words, showing that this level of organization must also be present to facilitate lexical access.

In 1912 Axel Thue sparked the study of combinatorics on words when he showed that the Thue-Morse sequence contains no overlaps, that is, factors of the form ayaya. Since then many interesting properties of sequences began to be discovered and studied. In this thesis, we consider a class of infinite sequences generated by automata, called the k-automatic sequences. In particular, we present a logical theory in which many properties of k-automatic sequences can be expressed as predicates and we show that such predicates are decidable. Our main contribution is the implementation of a theorem prover capable of practically characterizing many commonly sought-after properties of k-automatic sequences. We showcase a panoply of results achieved using our method. We give new explicit descriptions of the recurrence and appearance functions of a list of well-known k-automatic sequences. We define a related function, called the condensation function, and give explicit descriptions for it as well. We re-affirm known results on the critical exponent of some sequences and determine it for others where it was previously unknown. On the more theoretical side, we show that the subword complexity p(n) of k-automatic sequences is k-synchronized, i.e., the language of pairs (n, p(n)) (expressed in base k) is accepted by an automaton. Furthermore, we prove that the Lyndon factorization of k-automatic sequences is also k-automatic and explicitly compute the factorization for several sequences. Finally, we show that while the number of unbordered factors of length n is not k-synchronized, it is k-regular.

The aim of this study is to find out the main psychological problems of inner migrants’ children in Guiyang and to give some suggestions to treat these problems. Compared to other social groups, inner migrants’ children meet specific psychological issue in migrate processing. It is a world-wide issue, especially in the developing countries today. In this research, both qualitative method and quantitative one are used. The research result shows that there are three aspects that influence the psychological condition of the inner migrants’ children most. They are social-economic condition of the family, school environment, and social policy.

This thesis has explored English loan words in modern Japanese, in terms of phonological aspects and attempted to find the causes for the sound change in the English words when they were incorporated into Japanese. This thesis has also exemplified differences between English and Japanese sound systems and syllabic systems. In addition, the thesis has discussed causes for ellipsis of loan words and ten principles governing the occurrence of ellipsis and, finally, the thesis touched upon limitation of ellipsis.

A novel approach is proposed for real-time retrieval of images from a large database of overlapping images of an indoor environment. The procedure extracts visual features from images using selected computer vision techniques, and processes the extracted features to create a reduced list of features annotated with the frame numbers they appear in. This method is named landmark indexing. Unlike some state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed method does not need to consider large image adjacency graphs because the overlap of the images in the map sufficiently increases information gain, and mapping of similar features to the same landmark reduces the search space to improve search efficiency. Empirical evidence from experiments on real datasets shows high (90-100%) accuracy in image retrieval, and improvement in search time from the order of 100-200 milliseconds to the order of 10-30 milliseconds. The image retrieval technique is also demonstrated by integrating it into a 3D real-time navigation system. This system is tested in several indoor environments and all experiments show accurate localization results in large indoor areas with errors in the order of 15-20 centimeters only. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-24 12:44:41.429

Finally, the present thesis develops an analytic account of word recognition and reading in Chinese. Implications are drawn for both experimental studies of normal reading and neuropsychological studies of dyslexia in Chinese.

In this paper, an object recognition system has been developed that uses local image features. In the system, multiple classes of objects can be recognized in an image. This system is basically divided into two parts: object detection and object identification. Object detection is based on SIFT features, which are invariant to image illumination, scaling and rotation. SIFT features extracted from a test image are used to perform a reliable matching between a database of SIFT features from known object images. Method of DBSCAN clustering is used for multiple object detection. RANSAC method is used for decreasing the amount of false detection. Object identification is based on 'Bag-of-Words' model. The 'BoW' model is a method based on vector quantization of SIFT descriptors of image patches. In this model, K-means clustering and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification method are applied.

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