observers to make sense of the details and cooperativeness of interpersonal actions (Shibata et al 2009). This emerging line of N400 work thus shows that motor and object features make early, parallel contributions to how an action is understood. Moreover, preparation to execute a meaningful (but not meaningless) action influences the N400 to a word (related or not to the action’s goal) presented prior to action execution, indicating that semantic activation may be inherent in action preparation (van Elk et al. 2008). Clearly, actions can serve as a semantic context for words, and the N400 as a means of assessing how and when conceptual knowledge, language, and action converge.
