In the current study, the stimuli were presented sequentially and the subjects had to respond to each stimulus. This paradigm is expected to reduce post-lexical strategies on the semantic priming effect (McNamara and Altarriba, 1988; Silva-Pereyra et al., 1999). However, unlike those studies, the current study had antonym-pairs as compared to related pairs. Therefore, it can be said that ‘expectancy mechanism’ has more influence on semantic priming in the present study, where the subjects had a possibility to generate expectancy for the potential second-word of the antonym-pair. In addition, as the SOA was 1750 ms in the current study, it is assumed that controlled processes are relatively more involved with the priming effect rather than automatic spreading activation. Thus, it appears that expectancy for the second word of the antonym-pair was not (adequately) generated in HR subjects, or that these individuals could not process the inherent semantic relatedness of the antonym-pairs, and thus failed to match the semantic context to that of the antonyms. This indicates deficits in semantic expectancy and post-lexical semantic processing in high risk subjects. Similar deficits
