The groups did not differ significantly for other measures of performance in both primed and unprimed conditions (table 1). In addition, no significant main or interaction effects for group and condition differences for the ERP latency measures were observed in this study. Similar results for latency were reported by Nixon et al. (2002) and Ceballos et al. (2005). On the other hand, another study by Ceballos et al. (2003) obtained a significant difference in latency between alcoholics and community controls. However, the paradigm used in that study was a classical N400 sentence paradigm, which is different from the one used in the present study, and the alcoholic subjects had co-morbid diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. The lack of significant group differences in most performance and latency measures, as well as the lack of significant difference between groups in N400 amplitude for the unprimed word condition indicates that the observed deficit cannot be attributed to slowing of cognitive process, intelligence and/or general cognitive impairment in alcoholics (Grillon et al., 1991; Nixon et al., 2002), but rather a specific deficit in semantic priming processes.
