Revealing the neurofunctional correlates of semantic processing has been the fundamental goal of neuroimaging of language function. Studies using the ERPs have explored extensively the effects of semantic, contextual, and lexical characteristics on the N400, a negative deflection peaking at ∼400 ms after the onset of a potentially meaningful stimulus (Kutas and Federmeier, 2000; Luck, 2005; Van Petten and Luka, 2006). One of the most commonly employed paradigms is a lexical decision task requiring participants to decide whether a presented letter string is a real, meaningful word or not. Pseudowords are often used as the control stimuli. A large number of ERP studies have reported that the N400 to pseudowords is larger than or equivalent to the N400 to real words (Bentin et al., 1985; Holcomb and Neville, 1990; Holcomb, 1993; Federmeier et al., 2000; Deacon et al., 2004; Laszlo and Federmeier, 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2011).While pseudowords resemble real words in that they obey the orthographic and phonotactic rules, they carry no meaning. Consequently, the N400 has been interpreted as an attempt to access and integrate a semantic representation
