N400 studies expanded into much richer nonlinguistic contexts (reviewed in Sitnikova et al. 2008), looking at congruency effects within picture sequences conveying a story, photos of objects in a visual scene (roll of toilet paper versus soccer ball in a soccer game), and short videos of everyday events (razor versus rolling pin used as a razor in a clip of a person shaving). The N400 effects elicited in these paradigms resemble lexico-semantic N400s in morphology and timing, with some differences in scalp topography (more frontal than those seen for written abstract words) – although temporal overlap with an earlier, frontally-distributed negativity (N300) observed in such paradigms complicates topographic assessments. Willems et al. (2008) directly compared speech and picture N400 effects as individuals listened to sentences in which a critical word, a coincident depicted object, or both could be contextually congruent or incongruent. Relative to the wholly congruent condition, all mismatch conditions yielded larger fronto-central N400s indistinguishable in amplitude, latency or scalp topography. Such data argue against any view of sense-making in which linguistic information is treated differently (in time or
