To examine the role of meaning in morphological decomposition ({re‐}+{play}), researchers have employed the priming paradigm. Perceptually masked primes lead to facilitation both when decomposition is semantically appropriate (hunter‐HUNT) and when it is not (corner‐CORN), whereas with fully visible primes facilitation is observed only in the former case. We investigated the N400 brain potential time‐locked to words preceded by fully visible primes. At ∼300–380 ms, N400 was equally attenuated in the semantically “transparent” condition (hunter‐HUNT) and semantically “opaque” condition (corner‐CORN). In the transparent condition, N400 remained attenuated after 380 ms, whereas in the opaque condition it returned to the level of a nonmorphological form condition (brothel‐BROTH). This pattern of N400 priming is consistent with an orthography‐based, morphological decomposition mechanism, “licensed” at a later stage by semantic information.