Indeed, in many cases, discourse effects would seem to draw heavily on comprehenders’ world knowledge. On some accounts, this type of knowledge is taken to be distinct from facts about words and their meanings and thus should be processed differently – e.g., lexico-semantic knowledge integrated prior to world knowledge and pragmatics. N400 data unequivocally show that this type of account is not viable (Hagoort et al 2004): In the context of a sentence such as Dutch trains are ____ and very crowded, there is no measurable difference between the N400 to “sour,” which clearly violates semantic constraints, and that to “white,” which does not, but which is at odds with the fact of “yellow” Dutch trains (with smallest N400s); similar sensitivity to real-world script knowledge can be seen even in word priming (Chwilla & Kolk 2005). Voice-based inferences about who 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
