some accounts could be syntactic (constraints imposed by one’s grammar) or, by other accounts, semantic (part of each word’s meaning and how they are used in discourse). The ERP results were clear: agreement violations did not modulate N400 activity, but elicited a P600 (and sometimes LAN) instead, suggesting the brain treated them as syntactic rather than lexico-semantic in nature (Osterhout & Mobley 1995). Similarly, Japanese researchers used the presence of large N400s to argue for a semantic over a morpho-syntactic account of the links between nouns and their classifiers (quantifiers that agree with the type of entity being counted, Sakai et al 2006).
