the word ‘office’. Recently it has been shown that the N4 amplitude reduction observed to a primed stimulus, such as in antonym-pairs, is similar to the N4 amplitude reduction observed to congruent last words in sentences (Kutas and Federmeier, 2000). With respect to the semantic priming paradigm, a word preceded by an unrelated word (unprimed condition) produces a larger N4 in comparison to a word preceded by a related word (primed condition) (McCarthy and Nobre, 1993). For example, in the following two pairs of stimuli ‘North–Pencil’ and ‘Before–After’, the word ‘after’ elicits a smaller N4 compared to the word ‘pencil’. This is because the word ‘after’ is primed by the word ‘before’, while there is no priming for the word ‘pencil’.
