In sum, the N400 arises from a time period in which stimulus-driven activity enters into temporal synchrony with a broad, multimodal neural network, whose current states have been shaped by recent and long-term experience of a wide range of types (e.g., based on world experience, long-standing and recent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, attentional states, affect/mood, etc.). Federmeier and Laszlo (2009) have hypothesized that this temporal synchrony effects a binding, creating a multimodal conceptual representation. Notably, on this view, conceptual representations are not “looked up” in memory but are dynamically created and highly context dependent: because semantic memory states are continuously changing, the meaning of a given stimulus, defined as the configuration of neural activity that is bound together in response to that stimulus, will be somewhat different across people, time, contexts, and processing circumstances. The binding that occurs during the N400 is implicit and transient – although the activity elicited by a given input will have an influence for a short time (e.g., in the form of repetition or conceptual priming effects), even when explicit memory systems are compromised (as
