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It is generally assumed that access to phonology for words written in logographic Japanese Kanji must be mediated by access to their meaning. This proposal was examined in a semantic categorization task with homophones. If the assumption about Kanji processing were true, then homophony should have no effect on semantic judgments. However, there was a significant homophone effect: Reaction times (RTs) were longer and more errors occurred to homophone foils than to control foils. There was also a significant effect of visual similarity: Incorrect target words that were virually similar to correct exemplars of the category names yielded longer RTs and higher error rates. The effects of both visual similarity and homophony were obtained even under conditions of pattern masking (though only on errors)
Wydell et al. (Sat,) studied this question.