Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

Background  

Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.     

Microwave heating of ceramic composites

The microwave heating of a ceramic composite is modelled andanalysed. The composite consists of many small ceramic particlesembedded in a ceramic cement. The composite is assumed to bewell insulated, and each particle is assumed to be in imperfectthermal contact with the surrounding cement. Based on thesetwo assumptions an asymptotic theory exploiting the small Biotnumber and small non-dimensional contact conductance is developed.Our asymptotic theory yields a set of nonlinear partial differentialequations which govern the temperature in the composite. Theseare reduced to a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differentialequations in which the surface area of each particle entersas a parameter. Recent experiments with such composites haveshown that the steady-state temperature of the composite isstrongly dependent upon the radii of the embedded particles.Our model captures this effect. In fact, our analysis showsthat the assumption of imperfect thermal contact between theparticles and the ceramic cement is essential for this trendto be established.     

High-capacity method for purification of human liver hexosaminidase B using hydrophobic chromatography

Hydrophobic chromatography was investigated as a purification procedure for human liver hexosaminidases. Both phenyl-Sepharose and valine-Sepharose have a high binding capacity for hexosaminidases. A degree of resolution between the A and B isozymes is achieved with phenyl-Sepharose.Both hydrophobic supports myst be used close to their capacity in order to recover the applied enzyme.Two purification procedures for human liver hexosaminidase B were employed, which resulted in recoveries of approximately 48 and 24% with final specific activities of 33,400 and 4840 nmole/min·mg, respectively.     

Kinetics of the metathetical reaction between carbon tetrachloride and toluene

A metathetical reaction between carbon tetrachloride and toluene to give benzyl chloride and chloroform occurs at temperatures above 200°C (k = 4.8 × 10¹⁰ e^?32,900/RT cc mole^?1sec^?1). The reaction does not involve free radicals, as is shown by the kinetic behavior of the system, by the lack of effect of added free-radical chain inhibitors, and by the absence of the expected chain termination product, hexachloroethane. The reaction is one of a general type between carbon tetrachloride and alkanes or alkylaromatics, but at the temperatures required it is often obscured by dehydrohalogenation of the product to the highly reactive olefin. At high temperatures, benzyl chloride reacts with toluene to give bibenzyl and hydrogen chloride, apparently also by a metathetical reaction. The transition state is postulated to be four-center, in which the carbon-chlorine and carbon–hydrogen bonds are broken and reformed: The experimental preexponential factor is in good agreement with that calculated from transition-state theory.     

Laser-excited fluorescence of CSCl2

Resonance fluorescence spectra of the $\text{A}\text{?}{}^1\text{A}{}_2\text{→}\text{X}\text{?}{}^1\text{A}{}_1$ system of CSCl₂ are excited by an Ar⁺ laser operated at 5145 Å. The radiation is selectively absorbed by the 2₀¹3₀¹4₀¹ transition of the ³⁵Cl₂CS isotope. About 55 fluorescence bands have been measured and assigned, and the vibrational constants of the ground state have been calculated from the observed displacements.     

Anomalous atomic hydrogen shock pattern in a supersonic plasma Jet

A two-photon laser-induced fluorescence study on the transport of ground-state atomic hydrogen in a supersonic plasma jet, generated from an Ar-H (2) mixture, reveals an unexpected shock pattern. Whereas both the axial-velocity profile and the temperature profile of hydrogen atoms along the jet centerline can be interpreted in terms of a supersonic expansion of an Ar-H gas mixture, the H-atom density profiles do not satisfy the well established Rankine-Hugoniot relation leading to a nonconservation of the forward flux. The experimental results show that H atoms escape from the supersonic expansion by a diffusion process due to strong density gradients between the core of the jet and its vicinity.