We investigated whether verbs and nouns evoke comparable
behavioral and N400 effects in a primed lexical decision
task. Twenty-nine students were tested, 13 in a pilot study
in which only response times and error rates were collected
and 16 in a study in which ERPs were recorded from 124
scalp electrodes. Stimuli were noun–noun and verb–verb
pairs with the targets bearing either a strong, a moderate,
or no semantic association to the prime or being a pseudoword.
Behavioral data revealed comparable priming effects for
both word categories. These proved to be independent from
the SOA (250 and 800 ms) and they followed the well-known
pattern of decreasing response times and error rates with
increasing relatedness between target and prime. ERPs revealed
pronounced N400 effects for both word categories with a
larger amplitude for noun than for verb pairs. A systematic
analysis of topographic differences between noun- and verb-evoked
ERPs and N400 effects, respectively, gave no convincing
support to the hypothesis that the two word categories
activate distinct neuronal networks.