N400 turned out to be prelexical, calling into question claims about the priority, modularity, and insularity of word level analyses. On the other hand, as it happens, very few of the interpretations gleaned from studies using the N400 as a dependent measure would be substantively affected by the outcome of this debate. The automatic-controlled distinction aside, the data collected in an attempt to resolve this debate address the more general question of whether word meanings are invariably activated – irrespective of perceptibility, attention, awareness, task relevance, and other resource demands – and, in either case, what variables determine what meaning information is activated, to what extent, and for how long (reviewed in Deacon & Shelley-Tremblay 2000). A corollary of this debate in the N400 memory literature centered on whether N400 modulations were best thought of as reflecting implicit or explicit aspects of memory. Initial studies finding that N400 context effects were sensitive to task demands (Chwilla et al 1995), selective attention and pattern masking led to the view that the N400 was a controlled process and, therefore, on many accounts, post-lexical; this was the basis for the contextual integration view of the N400. Subsequent N400 data, however, called for a
