14 Japanese college students were requested to judge as quickly and as accurately as possible whether two Japanese words, one written in syllabic hiragana and the other written in logographic kanji, were pronounced the same or not. More errors and longer latencies were observed when two words were phonologically different but semantically related than when they were phonologically different and semantically unrelated. This finding is interpreted as demonstrating that the connection between kanji and meaning is stronger than that between kanji and phonology.
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