Wood, B. M. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures

The forms of many species vocal signals are shaped by their functions1-15. In humans, a salient context of vocal signaling is infant care, as human infants are altricial16, 17. Humans often alter their vocalizations to produce "parentese", speech and song produced for infants that differ acoustically from ordinary speech and song18-35 in fashions that have been proposed to support parent-infant communication and infant language learning36-39; modulate infant affect33, 40-45; and/or coordinate communicative interactions with infants46-48. These theories predict a form-function link in infant-directed vocalizations, with consistent acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. Some evidence supports this prediction23, 27, 28, 32, 49-52, but the limited generalizability of individual ethnographic reports and laboratory experiments53 and small stimulus sets54, along with intriguing reports of counterexamples55-62, leave the question open. Here, we show that people alter the acoustic forms of their vocalizations in a consistent fashion across cultures when speaking or singing to infants. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed singing and speech produced by 410 people living in 21 urban, rural, and small-scale societies, and analyzed their acoustic forms. We found cross-culturally robust regularities in the acoustics of infant-directed vocalizations, such that infant-directed speech and song were reliably classified from acoustic features found across the 21 societies studied. The acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differed across language and music, but in a consistent fashion worldwide. In a secondary analysis, we studied whether listeners are sensitive to these acoustic features, playing the recordings to 51,065 people recruited online, from many countries, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were largely accurate, predictable in part by acoustic features of the recordings, and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. By uniting rich cross-cultural data with computational methods, we show links between the production of vocalizations and cross-species principles of bioacoustics, informing hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

The length of lipoteichoic acid polymers controls Staphylococcus aureus cell size and envelope integrity

The opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureus is protected by a cell envelope that is crucial for viability. In addition to peptidoglycan, lipoteichoic acid (LTA) is an especially important component of the S. aureus cell envelope. LTA is an anionic polymer anchored to a glycolipid in the outer leaflet of the cell membrane. It was known that deleting the gene for UgtP, the enzyme that makes this glycolipid anchor, causes cell growth and division defects. In Bacillus subtilis, growth abnormalities from the loss of ugtP have been attributed to the absence of the encoded protein, not to loss of its enzymatic activity. Here, we show that growth defects in S. aureus ugtP deletion mutants are due to the long, abnormal LTA polymer that is produced when the glycolipid anchor is missing from the outer leaflet of the membrane. Dysregulated cell growth leads to defective cell division, and these phenotypes are corrected by mutations in the LTA polymerase, ltaS, that reduce polymer length. We also show that S. aureus mutants with long LTA are sensitized to cell wall hydrolases, beta-lactam antibiotics, and compounds that target other cell envelope pathways. We conclude that control of LTA polymer length is important for S. aureus physiology and promotes survival under stressful conditions, including antibiotic stress. IMPORTANCEMethicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a common cause of community- and hospital-acquired infections and is responsible for a large fraction of deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. S. aureus is surrounded by a complex cell envelope that protects it from antimicrobial compounds and other stresses. Here we show that controlling the length of an essential cell envelope polymer, lipoteichoic acid, is critical for controlling S. aureus cell size and cell envelope integrity. We also show that genes involved in LTA length regulation are required for resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics in MRSA. The proteins encoded by these genes may be targets for combination therapy with an appropriate beta-lactam.

microbiology↗