Extending the maze task to Hungarian: New insights in relative clause processing.

Relative clauses are one of the most studied constructions in sentence processing research. But even as the number of investigations has grown, there still remain open questions regarding the precise sources of observed processing effects. This article contributes to this domain by adapting the maze task paradigm to Hungarian, a free word order language where memory-based and expectation-based accounts of syntactic processing make distinct predictions for the processing of relative clauses. At the point of the relative pronoun, we observe an effect that is most consistent with expectation-based accounts. At the relative clause verb, we find mixed evidence: In L-maze, we see a memory-based locality effect, while in A-maze, an expectation-driven antilocality effect emerges. These findings add to an existing body of research showing that memory- and expectation-based effects can both occur within the same linguistic structure. We additionally conclude that while the maze task is a valuable tool for increasing language diversity in sentence processing studies, the partially divergent findings between its variants warrant further research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).