The two experiments in the study involving 108 grades 4, 5, and 6 Japanese children divided into skilled and less skilled readers examined the effects of vocal interference on the lexical decisions of target words written in two scripts (kanji and hiragana in Experiment 1, and katakana and hiragana in Experiment 2) presented in the same sentence contexts. While the processing of both the kanji and kana scripts were adversely affected by vocal interference, younger children and less skilled readers were more impeded than the older children and the skilled readers. Some suggestions are made about the factors affecting phonetic recoding in the morphemic kanji script, at least some of the times, and the regular kana script, under certain conditions.