Abstract: In order to explore how the lexical representation of the less proficient Chinese-English Bilinguals’ second language accesses its conceptual representation, the cross-language primed lexical decision task was used. Subjects were 63 university students in Beijing Normal University, China. In the first experiment, the Chinese target words were primed by their English translations. Significant priming effects were obtained. In the second experiment, the relation between the Chinese targets and the English primes was semantic association. No significant effect was found. In the third experiment, the targets were the similar graphic characters of the primes’ Chinese translations. The results showed a significant inhibitory effect. In the fourth experiment, the targets were the homophones of the primes’ translations. The results showed a significant priming effect. The results suggested that the lexical representation of the second language could only access the conceptual representation via the corresponding lexical representation of its first language. Our result supported the hierarchical model by Kroll(1994)

Key words: lexical representation, conceptual representation, access