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Two experiments were conducted to investigate the extent to which the lexical tone can affect spoken-word recognition in Chinese using a printed-word paradigm. Participants were presented with a visual display of four words-namely, a target word (e.g., 象限, xiang4xian4, "quadrant"), a tone-consistent phonological competitor (e.g., 相册, xiang4ce4, "photo album"), or a tone-inconsistent phonological competitor (e.g., 香菜, xiang1cai4, "coriander"), and two unrelated distractors. Simultaneously, they were asked to listen to a spoken target word presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or embedded in neutral/predictive sentence contexts (Experiment 2), and then click on the target word on the screen. Results showed significant phonological competitor effects (i.e., the fixation proportion on the phonological competitor was higher than that on the distractors) under both tone conditions. Specifically, a larger phonological competitor effect was observed in the tone-consistent condition than in the toneinconsistent condition when the spoken word was presented in isolation and the neutral sentence contexts. This finding suggests a partial role of lexical tone in constraining spoken-word recognition. However, when embedded in a predictive sentence context, the phonological competitor effect was only observed in the tone-consistent condition and absent in the tone-inconsistent condition. This result indicates that the predictive sentence context can strengthen the role of lexical tone.Keywords Lexical tone . Spoken-word recognition . Sentence context . Chinese . Eye tracking Most spoken-word recognition models agree that with the unfolding of spoken stimuli, more than one word candidate sharing partial phonemic information with the target will be shortly activated for competition (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980;McClelland & Elman, 1986). For example, when listening to a spoken word "beaker", lexical candidates sharing a similar initial syllable (e.g., "beetle", "beef", "bee") will be

Simultaneous catalytic removal of SO 2 and NO x at low temperature (<150 C) has long been recognized as a challenge for the treatment of coal-burned flue gases. Density functional theory corrected with dispersion was used to investigate the potential of graphene oxides (GOs) for the catalytic oxidation of SO 2 and NO x . It is found that both the SO 2 and NO x can be oxidized by epoxy groups of GO nearly at room temperature. The hydroxyl groups on the GO surface enhance the adsorption and oxidation of SO 2 , and of NO as well, but in quite different ways. For the case of SO 2 , the promotion is derived from the formation of charge transfer channels, which are fabricated by the hydroxyl group, the adsorbed SO 2 and the epoxy group. The promotion is enhanced by the introduction of more hydroxyl groups as more charge transfer channels are formed. However, for NO, the hydroxyl group leads to a strong N-C covalent interaction between the adsorbed NO molecules and the GO surface, through which the NO is activated and oxidized with a much lower barrier. These results provide a mechanistic explanation of the low temperature catalytic oxidation of SO 2 and NO by carbon materials and insights into designing new carbon-based catalysts.

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