long as 2000 ms (Deacon et al., 1999). In general, research evidence suggests that the N400 in priming paradigms reflects different mechanisms, such as automatic spreading activation (Deacon et al., 2004; Deacon et al., 2000; Kiefer, 2002; Kiefer and Spitzer, 2000; Kutas and Hillyard, 1989), expectancy (Kutas et al., 1984; Silva-Pereyra et al., 1999) and semantic matching (Chwilla et al., 1998; Holcomb, 1993), depending on the paradigm used. Similarly, the topography of N400 depends on the modality, type of stimulus and the paradigm of the study. For example, auditory N400 seems to be more evenly distributed over the scalp, whereas the visual N400 shows clear centroparietal predominance (Domalski et al., 1991).
