Abstract: For a given rate set, an IS-95 transmitter can generate an IS-95 signal at any one of four different data rates. According to the present invention, an IS-95 receiver performs a statistical analysis on the received data stream to determine which particular data rate was used by the transmitter. In particular, the IS-95 receiver uses partially decoded data from the received signal to generate a statistical value corresponding to the log likelihood function for each of the four possible data rates and selects the data rate having the largest corresponding statistical value as the data rate used by the transmitter to generate the signal. The receiver then uses this detected data rate to complete the process of decoding and reconstructing the data from the received signal.