be ‘semantic expectancy’, where upon presentation of the first word of the antonym pair, subjects tend to generate the expectation for the second word of the pair. Therefore, the lack of N400 attenuation observed in alcoholics in the current study indicates that they fail to efficiently process the inherent semantic relatedness present in the antonym-pairs that is supported by a significantly lower reaction time reduction between unprimed and primed conditions in alcoholics when compared to controls. This shows the presence of deficits in semantic expectancy and post-lexical processes in adult alcoholics. Apart from semantic congruity and repetitions, N400 amplitude also varies inversely with factors such as contextual integration with the information currently held in working memory, as well as association strength of the semantic memory and the ease of accessing information from memory (Brown and Hagoort, 1993; Fischler et al., 1983; Hutchison, 2003; Kutas and Federmeier, 2000; Nobre and McCarthy, 1995; Penke et al., 1997). As a result, it can be hypothesized that alcoholics have deficits in contextual integration, and assessing information from working memory. In addition, these might also be due to poor association strength of the lexical network or semantic memory networks. This is substantiated by earlier work
