The results of the current study showed that the primed word was processed much faster than the unprimed word in all subjects, and the control subjects had significantly more time savings, as measured by RT difference between the two conditions, than the alcoholics; the controls also showed significant attenuation of N400 amplitude to the primed word, a correlate of the priming effect, which was not observed in alcoholics. While N400 amplitude was not significantly different between groups for the unprimed condition, the alcoholic subjects were significantly different from control subjects in producing consistently larger N400 amplitudes for primed words (table 2). These findings suggest that alcoholics are perhaps unaffected by priming cues when compared to controls in a semantic priming paradigm using a lexical decision task (Figure 2, 3 and 4). Similar lack of N400 attenuation for primed words in non-alcohol dependent (high risk) children of alcoholics, when compared to a normal control low-risk group, was recently reported from our laboratory (Roopesh et al., 2009).
