abstract: Many researchers have pointed out that sentence complexity plays an important role in language maturity. Using cohesive devices is a critical method to composing complicated sentences. Several grammatical researchers give cohesive devices different definitions and categories in the perspective of pure linguistics, yet little is known about the Chinese learners' acquisition situations of cohesive devices in the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL). Combined with these definitions and pedagogical theories, the acquisition situations of four grammatical features of cohesive devices and eleven logical relations are discussed in this thesis. This thesis expects that through discovering different features of cohesive devices among different student levels, educators of Chinese will gain a more comprehensive understanding of the acquisition orders and features of conjunctive devices. In this study, I examine the teaching orders of cohesive devices in selected textbooks from first-year Chinese through fourth-year Chinese. Three groups of students were required to complete two essays based on the same topics and prompts. Twenty-eight valid writing samples are examined in total, including ten writing samples from fourth-year students, another ten from third-year students, and eight from second-year students. The results show that there are no obvious differences among the three levels of students in their use of certain grammatical features and logical relations of cohesive devices. Students in these three levels have difficulty understanding how to connect paragraphs together fluently and accurately in their compositions. Pedagogical implications include some suggestions about designing instructional writing assignments in order to give more clearly pedagogical instructions for teaching cohesive devices. In addition, comprehensible directions that explain which logical relations should be taught every academic year are proposed. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2013

In this thesis we presented a new direction for handling missing values in multi agent-based simulation (MABS) at micro-level by using truth tables and logical relations. Although micro-level simulation is a vast field to use logical relations with truth tables to find missing values but it takes values into account at individual levels. We used databases in form of tables to extract missing values. Our literature review suggested us a method for input handling by using electronically saved truth tables. We have defined logical relations according to scenario by interacting with truth tables to find appropriate missing values. Our conclusions suggested a method which can find appropriate values for input parameters when they are missing. Accurate results have been gained according to updated database. In this thesis we have concluded that missing values would be handled in different ways, such as: Artificial neural network, K-nearest neighbor, Statistical method and Data mining; etc… These methods have not facilitated in finding appropriate missing values as we saw in literature. We have created a method that can find missing values and produce good results. We have run our method on a specific scenario to check the efficiency of input handling that motivated us to arrange database in a proper way to handle missing values along.