a speaker is (e.g., probable age, gender, and/or social status) and thus what they are likely to know, believe, or say also modulate N400 activity. Furthermore, what knowledge is used and how is quite dynamic and flexible. As reviewed in Van Berkum (2009), a pragmatic anomaly out of context (e.g., peanuts falling in love), associated with large N400 amplitude, can be eliminated by a context that identifies the situation as fictional. Similarly, the insensitivity of the processes indexed by the N400 to negation (discussed above) is ameliorated when negation is pragmatically licensed (i.e., is being used to reasonable purpose), with equally reduced N400 amplitudes to sentence final words in “With proper equipment, scuba diving is safe/isn’t dangerous. N400 data thus attest to the incredible power of the language system to rapidly access, integrate, and adapt to word, sentence, and discourse information, along with world knowledge and common ground.
