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.     

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.     

Photo-catalytic oxidation of cyclohexane over TiO2: a novel interpretation of temperature dependent performance

The rate of cyclohexane photo-catalytic oxidation to cyclohexanone over anatase TiO(2) was studied at temperatures between 23 and 60 °C by in situ ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, and the kinetic parameters were estimated using a microkinetic model. At low temperatures, surface cyclohexanone formation is limited by cyclohexane adsorption due to unfavorable desorption of H(2)O, rather than previously proposed slow desorption of the product cyclohexanone. Up to 50 °C, the activation energy for photocatalytic cyclohexanone formation is zero, while carboxylates are formed with an activation energy of 18.4 ± 3.3 kJ mol(-1). Above 50 °C, significant (thermal) oxidation of cyclohexanone contributes to carboxylate formation. The irreversibly adsorbed carboxylates lead to deactivation of the catalyst, and are most likely the predominant cause of the non-Arrhenius behavior at relatively high reaction temperatures, rather than cyclohexane adsorption limitations. The results imply that elevating the reaction temperature of photocatalytic cyclohexane oxidation reduces selectivity, and is not a means to suppress catalyst deactivation.