In this paper a method for compensating for thp performance degradation or automatic speech recognition (ASR) is proposed. which is mainly caused by speaking rate variation. Before the new method is proposed. quantitative analysis of the performance of an HMM-based ASR system according to speaking rate is first performed. From this analysis, significant performance degradation was often observed in the rapidly speaking speech signals. A quantitative measure is then introduced, which is able to represent speaking rate. Time scale modification (TSM) is employed to compensate the speaking rate difference between input speech signals and training speech signals. Finally, a method for compensating the performance degradation caused by speaking rate variation is proposed, in which TSM is selectively employed according to speaking rate. By the results from the ASR experiments devised for the 10-digits mobile phone number, it is confirmed that the error rate was reduced by 15.5% when the proposed method is applied to the high speaking rate speech signals.