Effects of Persian Language Quantitative Characteristics of Rhythm on Children's English Songs

Linguists believe that languages have different rhythms. Rhythm is one of the important connections between speech and songs. One of the quantitative rhythmic differences between stress and syllable timed languages have been demonstrated by Grabe and Low (2002). In this method they measured the length of a syllable by vowel length which resulted in greater variability in syllable length where as a language with little variation in vowel length would have little overall variation in syllable length. This model to measure the amount of durational variability in a language is called the normalized pair wise variability index (nPVI). In this research in order to find out the effect of Persian language rhythm on the rhythm of children‘s English songs, the duration of vowels of l0 Persian songs and l0 English songs, that had been sung by Iranian children between 3 to 5 years of age, which had been recorded with a Shure microphone in a silent room, have been measured. Then the relative duration of vowels have been measured by nPVI. The results of this study indicate that means of durational variability of vowels in Persian and English vowels are different and the nPVI Values differ as well. Therefore the Persian rhythm affects the rhythm in English songs read by children of 3 to 5 years old.