The role of phonology in visual word recognition has been widely researched. Specifically,it is worth investigating whether the phonological processing of Japanese kanji is the same as that of an alphabetic writing system. The current study systematically examined articulatory suppression effects. Although articulatory suppression is a research tool often used to explore phonological processing in reading, it does not impair all types of phonological processing. Experiment 1A and 1B examined whether articulatory suppression disrupts rhyme judgments. Participants were shown pairs of two-kanji compound words and asked to judge whether they contained the same vowel. In both experiments, participants made more errors under an articulatory suppression condition. Experiment 2A and 2Bexamined whether articulatory suppression disrupts homophone judgments. The stimuli of Experiment 2A were the same as experimental stimuli of Experiment 1A. Theresults showed no articulatory suppression effect. The non-homophone pair was a phonologically similar pair in Experiment 2B. The results suggest that articulatory suppression had some interference effect on homophone judgment. The articulatory suppression effect on phonological processing of two-kanji words was similar to that of alphabetic writing system. Articulatory suppression must impair the segmentation process, irrespective of task type.