The N400 as an index of lexical preactivation and its implications for prediction in language comprehension

The N400 component's amplitude is standardly reduced for predictable words. But it is not clear whether this reduction truly reflects preactivation of the critical word or whether it just indexes the difficulty of integrating the word with the sentence. To adjudicate between these two accounts, event-related potentials were recorded while participants read short stories. In half of the stories, just before the story-final sentence, we induced an...