Risk status has been associated with deficits in cognitive functioning as revealed by electrophysiological and neuropsychological studies. These deficits may be associated with a predisposition for alcoholism and related disorders. In earlier neuropsychological studies, family history positive (FHP) men performed poorly compared to family history negative (FHN) men on language and memory tests (Hegedus et al., 1984; Tarter et al., 1984). With respect to electrophysiology, P3 amplitude reductions have been noted in children of alcoholics, thus indicating that the deficits associated with P3 are also associated with risk (Begleiter et al., 1984; Polich et al., 1994; Ramachandran et al., 1996). Using the lexical decision task/semantic priming paradigm that was used in the current study, Almasy et al. (2001) found significant heritability for N4 amplitude. Further, a significant reduction in N4 amplitude was observed in the FHP male offspring compared to FHN male offspring in a letter rhyming task (Schmidt and Neville, 1985). These studies indicate that the N4 deficits observed in alcoholics (Porjesz et al., 2002) may also be found in the HR individuals. This may be an index of
