Although an emerging theory of the neural and functional nature of the N400 may help to organize the growing literature and spark novel predictions, the outcome of current theoretical debates would have remarkably little impact on the contributions of the great majority of the work highlighted throughout this piece using the N400 as a dependent measure. Impressive gains have been made across a whole host of cognitive domains, and, perhaps most critically, the N400 has been instrumental in breaking down barriers between those domains. The N400 literature, taken as a whole, provides a compelling picture of how perception, attention, memory, and language jointly participate in the neural events responsible for the N400 – and thus together contribute to the amazing ability of the human brain to infuse its world with meaning.
