102 Stefan Koelsch different scalp distributions of the observed N400 effects could also be due to the fact that words were presented visually, and chords auditorily.In any case, the study by Steinbeis & Koelsch (2008a) revealed that a single mu-sical stimulus (a chord that is more or less pleasant) can infuence the semantic pro-cessing of a word (in this study presumably due to a chord’s indexical qualities). Note that participants were musicians; using the same experimental paradigm with non-musicians also showed an N400 when words were targets (Steinbeis, 2008), but not when chords were targets.We (Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2008a) also obtained fMRI data using the same experi-mental paradigm, and found that the semantic processing of words was related primarily to activity in temporal lobe structures, namely the posterior portion of the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) extending into the superior temporal sulcus (STS), again corresponding to Brodmann’s areas BAs 21/37. (There were also sub-threshold activations of inferior frontal cortex in both conditions that were presum-ably due to controlled selection and retrieval of conceptual representations, see also above and Lau et al., 2008). As mentioned before, these temporal regions play a role for the storage and activation of lexical representations (Lau et al, 2008). Nearby (presumably within the same cytoarchitectonic areas), activation maxima were ob-served for the semantic processing of the chords. The topographical difference of ac-tivations between the processing of chords and words in this study was perhaps due to the fact that words (such as “love”) have different lexico-conceptual entries than, for example, a consonant major chord. It is likely that spreading activation is a mechanism underlying these priming effects: Single chords may activate affective representations, which spread onto affectively related lexical representations. This hypothesis of purported underlying mechanisms could be tested by varying the SOA and observing the persistence or absence of the effects.Further experiments using the affective priming developed in the study by Stein-beis & Koelsch (2008a) used chords with pleasant and unpleasant timbres, as well as chords in major and minor mode as prime stimuli (i.e., target stimuli were always words; Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2011). Moreover, that study investigated both musicians and non-musicians. N400 effects for target words that did affectively not match with the prime chords were observed in the timbre, as well as in the major/minor mode experiment, with no statistical difference between musicians and non-musicians. These results showed that for both musicians and non-musicians a single chord is suf cient to communicate affective meaning (the meaning of the chords was pre-sumably due to a mixture of indexical and symbolic sign qualities, but this was not speci ed in that study).In another study (Griesner-Painter & Koelsch, 2001), it was investigated whether similar semantic priming effects can also be observed when single tones are used as primes and/or targets. Tones had different timbres, and target words were adjec-tives (for example, “tense”, “open”, “fast”, “strong”, “colourful”). Unrelated target words elicited the N400 effect, both when primed by tones, and when primed by words. Likewise, unrelated target tones elicited the N400 effect, both when primed