This book surveys the psycholinguistic dimensions of lexical access to the mental lexicon in Japanese, and attempts to synthesize the diversity of Japanese psycholinguistic research into the nature of written word processing in Japanese. Ten chapters focus on the nature of such psycholinguistic inquiry and its history, the structural origins of the Japanese script types and their relative frequencies, lexical access studies in Kanji, the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, Romaji, and mixed text processing, laterality preferences in Kana/Kanji processing and their implications for scientific discussions of language and cognition, evidence from eye-movement studies, the acquisition of orthographic skills by Japanese children, and a review of the implications and conclusions that arise from the contributions of such research.