Core Faculty

Garrett, Merrill

Professor

Program: Cognition and Neural Systems
Year of affiliation: 1987
Year of doctor degree: 1965
School: University of Illinois, Urbana

My research area is the study of language processing ("Psycholinguistics"). My work pays special attention to questions about how the meaning of a sentence is related to the 'nuts and bolts' of lexical retrieval (recognizing or generating a word) and syntax processing (building phrasal structures for sentences). One technique I have used extensively is the study of speech errors--mistakes that people make during speech--for example, those called "Spoonerisms" ("Please sew me to a sheet" instead of "Please show me to a seat"). Such errors are sometimes funny because of that you might have read examples in the Sunday paper or Reader's Digest now and again. But discovering the basic structure of such errors ('do the meanings of errors affect whether they happen or not?',' where do sounds or words move to when they move around in errors?''what kinds of units of language can move around and which ones can not?' etc.) is a quite serious scientific enterprise. The data from error studies provides a base for modeling normal language production processes and can also be linked to the study of language impairments (e.g., aphasia and dyslexia). My teaching emphasizes ways that solutions to scientific problems in Psychology depend on information from many different fields--it stresses interdisciplinary perspectives. In addition, students study the basic structure of research processes rather than just research outcomes. Knowing how we find out newthings is often helpful to us in evaluating how much we will rely on the old things we think we already know.

--- Core Faculty

Garrett, Merrill