Behavioral studies administering an acute alcohol challenge to healthy participants have reported detrimental effects on verbal learning and memory. Intoxication impairs free recall of verbal material (Maylor et al., 1990; Mungas et al., 1994), with semantic memory access being particularly affected (Maylor et al., 1990; Acheson et al., 1998). While explicit verbal memory is adversely affected by intoxication, implicit memory remains unimpaired (Lister et al., 1991; Tracy and Bates, 1999; Ray et al., 2004; Garfinkel et al., 2006). Neuroimaging studies of acute alcohol effects on language are scarce. A study using Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) showed that moderate intoxication reduces regional cerebral blood flow in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as well as performance during a verbal fluency test (Wendt and Risberg, 2001). Our previous work using ERPs has shown that moderately low alcohol intoxication affects visual word processing at both early and late stages during word recognition (Marinkovic et al., 2004b). More specifically, the left-dominant N180 was attenuated by alcohol, suggesting deficient feature identification and prelexical pattern analysis. Conversely, the larger N450 under intoxication indicates increased difficulty
