100 Stefan Koelsch by a musical excerpt in which the intervals of chords were set in wide position (therefore assumed to prime the concept of wideness), and in another trial by a mu-sical excerpt in which the intervals were often dissonant, and set in close position (therefore used as a non-prime for the word wideness). Note that the ordering of re-lated and unrelated primes was balanced across the experiment, and that any emo-tional content (such as pleasantness/unpleasantness) was controlled for.Like in the language condition, the ERPs elicited by target words that were meaningfully unrelated to the preceding musical excerpt showed an N400 (com-pared to the ERPs of target words that were meaningfully related to the preceding excerpt). That is, these results showed a modulation of the N400 elicited by the tar-get words as a function of the semantic t between musical excerpt and target word. That was the rst empirical evidence that musical information can prime represen-tations of meaningful concepts, and that music can systematically infuence the se-mantic processing of a word (for probably the rst behavioural experiment on this topic see Hevner, 1936). The priming of meaning by musical information was due to (a) iconic sign qualities, i.e. common patterns or forms (such as ascending interval steps priming the word staircase), (b) indexical sign quality, such as the suggestion of a particular emotion due to the resemblance to movements and prosody typical for that emotion (e. g., saxophone tones sounding like derisive laughter), or (c) sym-bolic sign quality due to meaning inferred by explicit extra-musical associations (e. g. a church anthem priming the word devotion). Unfortunately, is was not inves-tigated in that study whether N400 responses differed between these dimensions of musical meaning (and, so far, no subsequent study has investigated this). However, the results still allow to conclude that processing of extra-musical meaning is associ-ated with N400 effects.Results of that experiment were obtained when participants judged the related-ness of prime-target pairs. In an additional experiment, participants performed a memory task on the stimulus items (thus being oblivious of the true purpose of the experiment). Even with this task, the N400 was clearly modulated by the semantic t between musical excerpts and target-words. That is, musical information can prime representations of meaningful concepts even when participants do not judge the semantic relatedness between prime and target word. This argues for the notion that the musical information activated conceptual representations, and not covert verbalization of words (which then could have led to the observed N400 effects).The N400 effects elicited in the language condition (in which the target words followed sentences) did not differ from those observed in the music condition (in which the target words followed musical excerpts), with regard to amplitude, latency, and scalp distribution (and N400 effects did not differ between concrete and abstract words). In addition, a source analysis localized the main sources of the N400 effects, in both conditions, in the posterior part of the medial temporal gyrus bilaterally (Brodmann’s areas 21/37), in proximity to the superior temporal sulcus. These regions have been implicated in the processing of semantic information dur-ing language processing (reviewed, e. g., in Lau et al., 2008): Functional neuro-