The effect of chirp coefficient (C) on pulse splitting and spectral properties of femtosecond Gaussian pulse propagating in a three-level Λ-type atomic medium were investigatedby using the numerical solution of the full Maxwell-Bloch equations without the slowly varying envelope and the rotating-wave approximations.It is shown that,when area of the chirped pulse is smaller than or equal to 3π,regardless of size of the C,pulse splitting doesn′t occur,but the oscillation of the spectral component near the central frequency becomes more severe with the increasing of the C; when the 4π area pulse with smaller value of C propagates in the mediums,pulse splitting occurs,but the splitting doesn′t occur for the 4π area pulse with bigger value of C; and the oscillation of the spectral component near the central frequency becomes more severe and the pulse spectral bandwidth and the strength of the spectral component with higher frequency decrease obviously with the increasing of the C.For the pulse with larger area 8π,the case of pulse splitting is similar to 4π pulse,the pulse spectral bandwidth and the strength of the spectral component with higher frequency are not varied evidently with the increasing of the C,but distributions of peak values of the spectral component with higher frequency are very different for the puls with different values of the C.