On one end of the spectrum are views (Brown & Hagoort 1993; Hagoort et al 2009) that position the N400 relatively late (post item recognition) in this processing stream, associating the N400 to processes linking up (“integrating”) the semantic information accessed from the current word with meaning information encompassing multiple words (e.g., sentence or discourse message-level representations, presumably held in working memory). In particular, Hagoort et al. (2009) identify the N400 with semantic “unification” processes, defined as “the integration of lexically retrieved information into a representation of multi-word utterances, as well as the integration of meaning extracted from non-linguistic modalities”, placing special emphasis on the constructive nature of the meaning integration (“a semantic representation is constructed that is not already available in memory.”) Views of this type that associate the N400 with “post-lexical” aspects of semantic analysis can readily account for the multimodal and cross-modal nature of the N400, on the assumption that the various meaning-laden stimulus types ultimately converge on shared (or at least partially overlapping) conceptual level representations. They can also easily explain both the sensitivity of N400
