The purpose of this study is to investigate the eff ects of speech rate on chunking in listening comprehension of Chinese native speakers who learn Japanese as a second language. In the experiment, 18 advanced Japanese learners performed the semantic coincidence judgment and click sound detection tasks, where the speech rate of Japanese utterance and the position of extraneous sound (click sound) appearing in the sentence were manipulated. As a result, it was found that high speech rate has an

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... nhibitory eff ect on the detection of click sound in perceptual sense unit (PSU), and an accelerating eff ect on semantic analysis. In the low speech rate condition, the accuracy of click detection did not diff er depending on whether the click sound was inside or outside the PSU, but the meaning understanding was lowered compared with the high rate condition. It is demonstrated that the chunking process is dependent of the speech rate of utterance, and is realized in the speech rate, which almost matches the rhythm range of ordinary Japanese utterance. This indicates the development of L2 phoneme system stored in the long-term memory and activation of the related prosodic pattern.