Merrill Garrett passed away

MERRILL GARRETT 1935 - 2026

"We are deeply saddened to learn that professor Merrill Garrett, my dear personal friend,  passed away in Tucson on Friday January 30, 2026. When our Project Group for Psycholinguistics was established in 1976, Merrill Garrett became a member of our first Scientific Council. After the Institute was established in 1980, Merrill continued on the Council till 1993. In that role, he contributed significantly to conceiving our research agenda during our pioneering years.

The topic of speaking, utterance generation, was my core subject during these years and Merrill was the world’s leading scientist in this field. His classic 1975 paper The analysis of sentence production had defined the theoretical framework of the sentence generation system, with its functional, positional and sound level computational procedures. It was this theoretical framework that inspired the “blueprint of the speaker” in my 1989 book Speaking. Merrill’s paper had also set entirely new standards for the empirical analysis of spontaneous speech errors, based on the 3400 MIT speech error corpus collected by Garrett and Shattuck-Hufnagel.

The paper also prophetically described the way the Institute turned to using other, experimental reaction time methods in production research:  “I feel both that experimental enquiry can be better undertaken against a background of empirically supported working hypotheses and that the study of speech errors is a good way to generate and support such hypotheses”. That is exactly how we proceeded.

Merrill Garrett later also served on the Scientific Council of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

Merrill, over the years, sadly lost his wife Patty and both their two children, Cleve and Warren. He is survived by his former wife, Cecile McKee, who lovingly took care of him during his final weeks."

Pim Levelt