This study examined the relationship between phonological processing skills and comprehension in oral reading and listening among adult Japanese learners of English. Studies in L1 and the ESL environment have shown that the acquisition of efficient phonological processing skills is essential for reading comprehension and listening comprehension. Data collected from a pseudoword naming task, an oral sentence reading task, and a sentence repetition task confirmed that the decoding efficiency of pseudowords was correlated with reading and repetition speed. However, neither reading performance nor reading speed correlated with comprehension, while both repetition performance and repetition speed did. Therefore, it can be argued that efficient phonological processing plays an important role in listening comprehension but not in reading comprehension. Although participants may have formed their own phonological representation that is incorrect, they may nevertheless have managed to successfully form correct semantic representation. Such results may reflect the dissociation between listening ability and reading ability that is often argued in the case of Japanese learners of English.
