In languages such as Japanese, hearers often encounter a sequence of more than two identical vowels. We investigated how, and to what extent a hearer can successfully segment each mora in such consecutive vowel series. In the following experimental reports, we particularly discuss effects of prosodic information such as pitch pattern and rhythm of speech. We argue that various kinds of information (pitch, rhythm, duration, lexical information) contribute to the segmentation of three or more consecutive vowels.
