Because the transition from unimodal to multimodal processing (e.g., from wordform to the concept that word brings to mind) is neither dependent upon nor driven by a particular functional outcome of perceptual analysis, all types of stimuli, from the highly practiced to the completely novel, would be expected to elicit N400 activity to some degree, with the amount and nature of that activity a function of the stimulus-induced state of the perceptual system at the time that semantic access is initiated. For example, to the extent that neural representations are distributed and/or the activation of stimulus features is noisy (e.g., that the visual input C-A-B activates not only “CAB” but also, to some extent, “DAB”, “CUB”, and “CAR”), semantic information associated with all of these co-activated representations will come online together, with a strength proportional to the strength of the eliciting perceptual signal. Rather than reflecting the activation of “a word’s meaning”, then, the N400 region of the ERP is more accurately described as reflecting the activity in a multimodal long-term memory system that is induced by a given input
