their context (Kutas and Federmeier, 2000). Some of these factors are semantic congruity, antonyms, high frequency words and repetitions. Studies have shown that N4 reflects contextual integration (Brown and Hagoort, 1993). This view emphasizes the importance of the fit between the eliciting item and context-based information currently held in working memory. If there is a fit, integration will be easier and correspondingly the N4 is reduced. In addition, N4 also appears to vary inversely with the ease of accessing information from long-term memory. For example, the more the frequency of usage (or repetition) of a word, the smaller the N4 amplitude it will elicit (Fischler et al., 1983; Kutas and Federmeier, 2000). There are different strategies for eliciting N4 that have been reported in the literature. Unlike the earlier methods of presenting sentences with the last word being congruent or incongruent, the lexical decision task used in this study involves presentation of letter strings in sequence. The subject must decide whether the stimulus presented is a word or a non-word. Within this framework, the semantic priming task has been one of the most extensively used paradigms to observe the effect of priming on N4 (Bentin, 1989; Ganis et al., 1996).
