An important early – and now long-standing – debate concerned the role of attention in the elicitation of N400 effects. The prevalent view at the time divided cognitive processes into those that required attention (so-called “controlled” processes) and those that proceeded without attention or awareness (so-called “automatic” processes). Of interest, in the context of this debate, was whether the N400, and the aspects of semantic processing it seemed to index, are controlled or automatic in nature. In the domain of language, the answer to this question would help classify the N400 as a “prelexical” or “postlexical” process, happening either before or after the “magic moment” of word recognition. At a theoretical level, a lot might hinge on the answer to this question, as the sensitivity of the N400 to sentence-level context information would pose problems for certain theories if the N400 turned out to be prelexical, calling into question claims about the priority, modularity, and insularity of word level analyses. On the other hand, as it happens, very few of the interpretations gleaned from studies using the N400 as a
