This article through performing a comparative study between quantitative (prosody) meter and accentual-syllabic meter analyzes the characteristics of the songs in the two dialects. A number of Gilaki poems are in quantitative meter, but this language did not happen to be a standard dialect; besides its vowel system is not made in a way to express the quantitative meter, and thus the principles of this meter have never had the chance to be standardized in Gilaki dialect. As a result, the verse form for these poems turned to be accentual-syllabic which is the original meter in all Iranian dialects.

This article, following the Metrical Stress Theory of Bruce Hayes, studies the nature of meter in Persian folk poems. The accentual-syllabic meter of these poems is formed by the repetition of accents in equal syllabic distances. Metrical Stress Theory is a branch of generative phonology that has the capability of determining the poem’s rhythm and displaying them in tree diagrams. This article after explaining the Metrical Stress Theory, represents the rhythmical hierarchy of Persian folk poems - lines, half-lines, feet - in tree diagrams and presents the rules for accentual-syllabic meter in folk poems.

Syllabic meter is formed by the regular repetition of syllables, pauses (caesurae), and hemistiches. The quantity of syllables as well as their weight have no functional role in the structure of syllabic meter, therefore this meter is substantially different with the Persian quantitative meter in classical poetry and Persian isochronous accentual folk meter which are based mainly on syllable weight and metrical accents respectively. Although the syllabic meter is usually current in such syllable-timed languages as French in which syllables have equal quantities, sometimes, for some historical and or cultural reasons, evidences of syllabic meter have been observed in languages such as Persian in which syllables have different quantities. Syllabic meter, as it has been mentioned already, is not current in Persian at all, but this meter has been used by some poets in Persian from the ancient times to the present day. This paper deals with the structural analysis of such poems. In this article, after a brief discussion on the classification of different meters in world languages, Persian syllabic meter has been introduced and it structural characteristics has been shown as follows: 1. Persian poets, when composing in this meter, make use of mostly long (heavy) syllables; 2. The pauses in this meter are always of caesura types, i.e. it appears always after a phonological word (or prosodic constituent) break; 3. Although the end part of each pause in this poem is accompanied always by a stress, this stress is not a metrical one, but a pitch accent, and this point shows clearly that stress has just a secondary role in the main structure of this meter in Persian. In this article a method has been also introduced for representing and classifying all kinds of Persian syllabic meter.

Despite the differences that recently have arisen in determining the meters of the folk poetry, it can be said with confidence that the meters of the folk poems follow the rules of syllabic accentual meters. Work songs (work poetry) is a branch of folk poetry which is read in harmony with the rhythm of the work and it has work-related content. Workers recited these poems in groups or individually to refresh themselves, making work easy and faster. In this article, at first, we have defined the work songs and its types and characteristics, and then analyzed the meters of these poems from two perspectives: the quantitative meters, and the syllabic accentual meters. We have found that the work songs follow the syllabic accentual meters and there is a significant relationship between the meters of work songs in a specific branch. The work songs also match the rhythm of the work. Also, by changing the work rhythm, it takes on different rhythms as well.

There is not an agreement among experts concerning the meter of children’s poetry; some consider it prosodic and some no-prosodic. The present article, based on the ideas of poets and specialists, and taking into consideration the evidence from different languages, concludes that the meter of children’s poetry is sometimes prosodic and sometimes non-prosodic. But in the non-prosodic poems, in contrast to the beliefs of the most experts, the findings of this article show that the meter is not syllabic but stressed-syllabic

In this paper, based on Lazard’s description of Parti verses (1985, 2007) and Tabibzade’s description of Persian folk verses and Fahlaviat (1382,1392), we discuss four main hypotheses about Shahrezaian folk verses. The first hypothesis is that the last syllable of each foot which gets ictus is a heavy syllable. The second one is that if this is not a heavy syllable, it is necessarily at the end of the word and gets lexical stress. The next hypothesis is that syllables which are not the last syllable of the foot and do not get ictus; do not have any relationship with syllable weight. So they may be light or heavy. And the last hypothesis is about the place of pause in metron and foot. In these verses, like Persian folk verses, the place of pause is of a dierese kind. It means it is not necessarily at the end of the word, but it can also be at the middle of the word. For the statistical analysis of these items, we listed last and non-last syllables of 50 items of Shahrezaian folk verses in Excel program and came to the conclusion by the help of a statistical study.

Proper understanding and processing of a speaker’s emotional prosody is critical to effective social interaction. Vocal emotional expressions which carry a rich source of information about a speaker’s emotions and his/her social intentions are influenced by individual differences (eg, gender, age); among those, the role of gender has not been sufficiently studied and is still under debate. Moreover the existing literature on gender and emotional prosody has targeted speakers of stress-timed languages (ie, German and English). However, since prosody is affected by language-specific features such as the rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed- vs. syllable-timed), the author questioned the applicability of the results of the existing studies to languages with a different rhythmic division of time. Therefore, the present study examined the role of gender in the recognition of emotional prosody in native speakers of Persian, a syllable-timed language. To do this, in a behavioral experiment, 66 native speakers of Persian were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated vocal portrayals. These vocal portrayals were a set of sentences with emotionally neutral lexical content, intoned in one of 5 intended emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) by a male and a female actor. The data of this test were examined by availing from logistic regression. In general, the results established that the recognition of emotional prosody significantly differed as a function of gender, that is, female participants outperformed their male counterparts in recognizing all the intended emotional categories. Additionally, our results suggest that rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed vs. syllable-timed) does not influence the emotion recognition performance.

Based on the study of Lazard (1985,2007) and Tabibzadeh (2013, 2003) about the Persian folk poetries, we study Hamedani folk poetries. We want to look for the answers of these hypothesis. First, the ictic syllable is a heavy syllable. Second, if this is not a heavy syllable, it is the final syllable of the word and therefore takes lexical stress. In the third hypothesis we assume that in Hamedani folk poetries, the pause takes place in the middle of the word as well as at the end of the word. To analyse these hypothesis, we investigated syllables, feet and lines of one hundred Hamedani folk poetry and saw the three hypothesis were true. 84.6% of the syllables which took the ictus place were heavy syllables and the rest (15.4%) were light syllable at the end of the words. Also, 35% of the pauses locate in the middle of the words.