Phonological coding plays a major role in the identification of words in English. But to what extent is access to phonology for words written in logographic Japanese Kanji mediated by access to their meaning? This study set out to answer this question in a memory task with homophones and visually similar words. The effects of both homophony and visual similarity were obtained under conditions of the "selective interference" paradigm, designed to investigate the involvement of the articulatory control system and visual recall in memory. Both native English (n = 80) and Japanese (n = 72) speakers, readers of fundamentally different orthographies, were examined. The patterns of interference suggest that the memory strategies employed with both English words and Kanji are characterized by similar strategies. In particular, phonologically similar words caused more confusion than visually similar words. Articulatory suppression caused much interference in memory span in both language groups. The results support the universal phonological principle, which predicts automatic activation of phonological information in all languages.

Key words: English, Kanji, phonological similarity, visual similarity, articulatory suppression