Vowel harmony is a phonological process during which vowels acquire the feature(s) of nearby vowel(s). In the first part of the present article, patterns of Persian vowel harmony are discussed. The paper shows that vowel harmony occurs within morphemes and across morpheme boundary in this language and certain consonants are transparent, while others are opaque in different harmony patterns. It is further argued that when vowel harmony occurs within a morpheme, the target is in most cases [e,æ,o] and the trigger is [i,u,A], and when vowel harmony occurs across morpheme boundary, all the six vowels of Persian can be the trigger, whereas only [e] and [æ] are targets. In the second part of the article, patterns of Vowel-to-Vowel coarticulation in Persian are investigated. V-to-V coarticulation is a phonetic process during which vowels in a string of
segments affect one another, but the influences are too subtle for hearers to detect. V-to-V coarticulation can only be detected through instrumental investigation. The acoustic investigation of the laboratory speech of two adult male speakers of Persian showed that in this language V-to-V coarticulation is sensitive to vowel quality, the voicing characteristics of the intervocalic consonant and its place of articulation.
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