A phonetic study of rhythm in the feet of: persian words, prose and poetry

Linguistic rhythm is studied in the 3 fields of: metrical structure, speech rhythm, and metrics (poetry). For Persian language, feet are recognized as Iambic in 4 combinations of syllables (Tabibzadeh, 1386), metrics for classical poetry is also comprehensively studied (Najafi, 1386-a&b) and as for the speech rhythm of Persian, guesses about syllable-timing (Haghshenas, 1376) has been examined by phonetically-based quantitative index (Booban,1386). However, the relations of these three areas and their phonetic correlates are not clearly observed so far.Here, recognizing Persian as a syllable-timed language, which means that syllables basically shape the rhythmic structure, we have segmented samples of utterance in standard Persian including words, prose and poetry to the P-centers (perception centers) of their syllables and examined the iambic feet in the timing structures that are easily observed through such segmentation. Results are in harmony with the phonological acclaims for feet structure in Persian.