Effects of Concurrent Articulation on Reading Japanese Kanji and Kana Words

In written Japanese, there are two types of scripts: logographic kanji and syllabic kana. Three experiments investigated effects of concurrent articulation on decisions about words that are normally written in kanji either presented in kanji or transcribed in kana. Concurrent articulation disrupted rhyme decisions and homophone decisions for the kanji condition more than for the Kana-transcribed condition (Experiments 1 and 2) and did not disrupt lexical decisions in either the kanji condition or the Kana-transcribed condition (Experiment 3). The results were interpreted as indicating that concurrent articulation does not disrupt the generation of assembled phonology in Japanese, consistent with findings using English materials.