Abstract: Ethnic students in our country generally master three languages: their mother language, the second language (usually Chinese) and the third language (usually English). The cognitive processing characteristics of ethnic students’ three languages have been an important access to understand the language cognition of ethnic students, as well as the emphasis of studies in linguistic and psychological fields. Previous studies had focused on language representation of ethnic students’ three languages, ways of connection among their three languages and the processing characteristics represented during the course of language comprehension and production. Some researchers also have probed the processing characteristics of their second language. This paper gives a review on previous studies focusing on the above issues, and gives us several pieces of advice on further research. In further research, we should pay more attention to the aspects such as the processing characteristics of different ethnic students and the respective features as well as influencing factors in processing their mother language, their second language (usually Chinese) and their third language.

Key words: Ethnic students, bilingual, language representation, language association