Event-related potential correlates of the expectancy violation effect during emotional prosody processing

▶ We investigated the ERP correlates of expectancy violation effect during emotional prosody processing with three experiments. ▶ The brain is able to detect the deviation in sentential emotional prosody rapidly irrespective of attention allocation. ▶ Deviation with large emotional significance would increase the vigilance and assign significance during speech comprehension. ▶ A process of re-analyzing and integrating would take place if the deviation is task relevant. ▶ The emotionality seems to speed up the perception and step up more vigilance during this process.