Foreword to the special issue. "Before the N400: Early Latency Language ERPs"

As cognitive and neural models of language processing have developed, so have the ranks of language-related event-related potential (ERP) components. This special issue is intended to showcase current cutting-edge research on this topic, with an emphasis on those ERP components peaking earlier than the N400, and their implications for neurocognitive language models. Both reading and speech comprehension are addressed due to the close relationship between these two topics. As the contents of this special issue illustrate, the high temporal resolution of the ERP methodology makes it especially suitable for illuminating three fundamental questions about the language comprehension process: (1) How early is semantics? (2) In what order do these cognitive operations occur in? (3) To what extent are the cognitive operations serial and to what extent are they in parallel?