Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as away of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies.The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English. Most current models of visual word recognition and naming assume the existence of at least two processing routes for the pronunciation of written words. That is, upon presentation of a printedword, phonology is retrieved through a lexical–semantic pathway (or network) as well as assembled through a spelling–sound mapping process (see, e.g., the computational model
