My MA thesis is on the role of radicals in Kanji word processing. Logographic scripts (such as Japanese Kanji) are different from alphabetic scripts. In logographic scripts, each written symbol represents a morpheme or word; therefore, readers of logographic scripts have to memorize thousands of logographic symbols. These types of scripts may help shed light on orthography-to-semantics connections in the mental lexicon. A common point of contention in logographic word recognition is whether the processing route goes from whole-to-part or part-to-whole. As radicals (small meaningful units) make up the Kanji characters, it may be intuitive to assume that these radicals also contribute to the recognition of individual words. On the other hand, the semantic or phonetic relation of the radicals to the whole word is not always clear; therefore, we cannot be certain that radicals are processed alongside whole words. In my research, I aim to shed light on this issue with a new methodology and a relatively underrepresented statistical modeling approach (Generalized Additive Mixed Models/GAMMs)