September, 2011: Natasha Warner was awarded an Earl Carroll Magellan Fellowship. Her work is on how humans communicate through the variability of conversational speech. In spontaneous, casual speech, many sounds are deleted: for example, "do you have time" can sound like "dyutem," "he was" can sound the same as "is," and "she'd be like" can sound like "shilleye." Still, even these very reduced pronunciations are completely intelligible when heard in context, and they allow speakers to convey information quickly, and to convey the fact that the conversation is casual. Warner's lab investigates such pronunciations we as well as how listeners combine information to understand this "sloppy" speech. In a separate aspect of her research, Warner works with a Native American tribe in California to help them revitalize their ancestors' language, Mutsun, which has not had any living speakers since 1930. Warner works with archival documents about the language, with database software, and with community activists to help Mutsun community members learn and bring back their heritage language.