With the rapid growth of the literature have come attempts to develop theories of the N400. Some of these are anchored at the neurobiological level, seeking to delineate the brain network(s) responsible for the N400 (Lau et al 2008) and linking the component to specific neural functions, such as binding (Federmeier & Laszlo 2009). Others are framed at a functional level, mapping the N400 onto particular cognitive operation(s), such as orthographic/phonological analysis (Deacon et al 2004), semantic memory access (Kutas & Federmeier 2000; van Berkum 2009), or semantic/conceptual unification (Hagoort et al 2009). Many of these functional views are based on the underlying assumption that comprehension involves a feedforward series of processes in which words are analyzed first as perceptual objects and then as linguistic objects (lexical processing), culminating in the match between a phonological or orthographic input and a representation in the “mental lexicon” – i.e., in word recognition. Critically, upon recognition, semantic (among other types of) information becomes available and can then be integrated with the current mental model of the unfolding sentence or discourse. A similar stream
