the N400 have been “suspended” or “blocked” (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky 2008; Kolk & Chwilla 2007). In these cases there are N400 responses, just not differential levels of activity in the semantic system across two inputs that ultimately yield different plausibility judgments. Similar considerations apply to the literature employing “double violation” paradigms (in which a given word violates constraints at multiple levels of analysis) to ask how different aspects of language (especially semantic and syntactic ones, but also prosodic) interact (Gunter et al. 2000; Hagoort 2003). These studies have revealed complex interactions between meaning and form based analyses, but, more generally, serve to highlight the utility of the multidimensional nature of the ERP signal, which allows different types of language-related effects to be examined in parallel, on the same word, without obfuscating their separate influences.
