In visual word recognition and reading, it has become a heatedly debated issue whether word meaning is accessed directly from spelling (orthography) or indirectly from sound (phonology) after phonological recoding. Using a semantic relatedness decision task, the present study investigated how advanced EFL learners in China accessed word meaning in reading Chinese (L1) and English(L2). In this task, subjects read a pair of words and decided whether they were related or unrelated in meaning. It turned out that homophone pairs both in Chinese and English were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, suggesting phonological access of word meanings. Implications were discussed for formulating methods and techniques aimed at teaching children to read in L2 and at remedying L2 reading deficits.