Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of speech rate (articulation rate and pauses) on word recognition and listening comprehension of junior college students in Japan. In this study, the effects of two types of speech speed (130wpm, 170wpm) and those of three types of pause conditions (natural-pause, sentence-pause, and phrase-pause) were examined with regard to a word recognition test and a listening comprehension test. It was found that speech speed strongly affected the subjects' scores on the word recognition test. Significant interaction between speech speed and pauses were observed in scores on the comprehension test. The effect of frequent pauses (phrase-pause) was significant when speech speed was high. The results indicate that speech speed is the influential factor for word recognition, while artificially inserted pauses help learners to comprehend the passages when the speech speed is high.
