You ask good questions.* I’d love to read the results of such a study.
Long off-topic discussion
I strongly suspect that many Wanikaniers fail to create strong associations with the sounds and meanings of items. Instead, they form associations to the hiragana-via-romaji-IME-keystrokes and the English translations.
About the only advantage of my slow path (learning to read only decades after learning to speak a bit) is that I can’t help but hear the Japanese in my mind.
I’ve seen uncountable complaints along the lines of “I can read any Japanese novel you throw at me but struggle with any conversation more complex than ‘This is a red pencil’”. I strongly suspect that they are translating in their head rather than conversing in Japanese. Translating is far more difficult.
An English word isn’t the meaning of a vocabulary item. The English word is a translation, a single expression of a concept that’s distinct from the concept itself. This is a difficult meta-concept to explain! (I’m amazed by academic linguists that think about things like this all the time.)
I’ve recently begun trying English-meaning to Japanese-reading self-study drills for early-stage vocabulary. When I only have a few, I find it quite worthwhile, but I often go back to just reading/meaning drills for several reasons.
Sometimes I just have too many early stage vocab for my “pre-study”. Occasionally there are too many synonyms, even when restricting myself to newly introduced items (“field” and “clothes” bit me recently).
Even when I stick with it, though, it still feels like a two step process: English → concept → Japanese (though I don’t think there’s any solution to this, nor does it differ from Japanese → concept → English).
Re: pairing
I hadn’t really thought about it until you brought it up, but WK did me a solid when they introduced the shake notification entering readings when they ask for meaning. I still do this all the time. I think I was on level 15 or so before I even noticed the white/black background hint.
I’ve even started using Breeze Dark with a special “review meaning background” to really make it extremely obvious when they are asking for meaning (it helped slightly, but I still start typing the reading about half the time).
The other direction (entering meaning when queried on reading) has happened to me on rare occasions, but it’s far less common, and the gobbledy-gook on my screen is usually enough to keep me from hitting the Enter key. (The even rarer occasion where typing English works with the IME is like an Easter egg and usually good for a laugh — “do” comes to mind.)
* Every PhD I’ve known has this annoying habit of asking startlingly simple questions (always with profoundly complex answers).
Two more thoughts after this morning’s reviews:
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Because I’m in the habit of typing “f” to display the correct answer whenever I get it wrong, I sometimes unintentionally see both correct answers (reading and meaning) because the WK provided mnemonic includes both.
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I’m far from perfect in associating concepts rather than the English words. I think I mentioned previously that I often remember just the first letter or syllable of the English word I’ve associated with the term (rather than the concept itself). This indicates I’m trying to recall the English word rather than the concept. I can’t think of any way to avoid this, though.