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

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Sentence processing research extensively studies relative clauses.
• Existing research has open questions on the precise sources of processing effects.
• Syntactic processing theories include memory-based and expectation-based accounts.

Purpose of the Study:

• Adapt the maze task paradigm to Hungarian, a free word order language.
• Investigate processing effects in Hungarian relative clauses.
• Differentiate between memory-based and expectation-based syntactic processing accounts.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the maze task paradigm adapted for Hungarian.
• Analyzed processing effects at the relative pronoun and the relative clause verb.
• Compared findings from L-maze and A-maze task variants.

Main Results:

• An effect consistent with expectation-based accounts was observed at the relative pronoun.
• A memory-based locality effect emerged at the relative clause verb in the L-maze.
• An expectation-driven antilocality effect was found at the relative clause verb in the A-maze.

Conclusions:

• Both memory- and expectation-based effects can occur within the same linguistic structure.
• The maze task is valuable for diversifying sentence processing studies.
• Further research is needed due to partially divergent findings between maze task variants.