פרסומים

Being used by multilingual individuals and in multilingual contexts for more than half a millennium, all present-day varieties of Judeo-Spanish show characteristics that evidence cross-linguistic influence from the respective surrounding languages. Judeo-Spanish vowel systems, for instance, often mirror specific features of the vowel systems of their contact languages. The present contribution presents a spectral and auditory analysis of unstressed vowels in a small corpus of Istanbul Judeo-Spanish semi-spontaneous speech. It is shown that some unstressed vowels display alternations that can be explained by partial transfer of vowel harmony from the surrounding language Turkish. Nonetheless, the transfer of this phonological process seems to be inhibited by the high functional load unstressed word-final vowels bear in Judeo-Spanish, i.e., the rules of Turkish vowel harmony would negatively interfere with Judeo-Spanish nominal morphology. We assume that for this reason, vowel-harmonic alternations occur only to a limited extent in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.

Objectives: Aminoglycoside resistance in bacteria is typically conferred by specific drug-modifying enzymes. Infrequently, such resistance is achieved through 16S ribosomal RNA methyltransferases, such as NpmA and KamB encoded by Escherichia coli and Streptoalloteichus tenebrarius, respectively. These enzymes are not widespread and have not been described in Nocardia species to date. Methods: We report the genomic mining of 18 Nocardia wallacei isolates that were found to be specifically and substantially resistant to amikacin. Results: We identified a gene coding for a protein with very distant homology to NpmA and KamB. However, 3-D modeling revealed that the tertiary structure of these three proteins was highly similar. Cloning and expressing this gene in two susceptible bacteria Nocardia asteroides, and Mycobacterium smegmatis (another Actinobacterium) led to high-level, pan-aminoglycoside resistance in both cases. We named this gene warA (Wallacei Amikacin Resistance A). Conclusions: This is the first description and experimental characterization of a gene of this family in Nocardia, and the first demonstration that such activity could lead to pan-aminoglycoside resistance in Mycobacteria as well. The discovery of this novel gene has important biotechnology and clinical implications.

Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. This study investigates the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals’ facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Leveraging the face–name matching effect, which demonstrates an ability to match adults’ names to their faces, we hypothesized that individuals would resemble their social stereotype (name) in adulthood but not in childhood. To test this hypothesis, children and adults were asked to match faces and names of children and adults. Results revealed that both adults and children correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level. However, when it came to children’s faces and names, participants were unable to make accurate associations. Complementing our lab studies, we employed a machine-learning framework to process facial image data and found that facial representations of adults with the same name were more similar to each other than to those of adults with different names. This pattern of similarity was absent among the facial representations of children, thereby strengthening the case for the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis. Furthermore, the face–name matching effect was evident for adults but not for children’s faces that were artificially aged to resemble adults, supporting the conjectured role of social development in this effect. Together, these findings suggest that even our facial appearance can be influenced by a social factor such as our name, confirming the potent impact of social expectations.