This experiment was designed to explore the effects of Chinese lexicalization on the time course of English lexical inferencing procedures with the online response time method. The experimental discourses comprised both Chinese lexicalized and non-lexicalized English target words. The results showed that: (1) Chinese lexicalization affected the time course and the response error rate of participants’ English lexical inferencing procedures. They spent less time and more successful in inferring the meanings of Chinese lexicalized English target words than that of Chinese non-lexicalized English target words; (2) Participants’ receptive vocabulary knowledge was significantly correlated with their success rate in arriving at the meanings of Chinese lexicalized English target words, whereas it was not significantly correlated with their success rate in inferring the meanings of non-lexicalized English target words and their response time in inferring the meanings of both lexicalized and non-lexicalized English target words; (3) No significant correlation was observed between participants’ lexical inferencing success rate of Chinese lexicalized English target words and their response time spent in arriving at the meanings of Chinese lexicalized English target words, and participants’ lexical inferencing success of Chinese non-lexicalized English target words and their response time spent in arriving at the meanings of Chinese non-lexicalized English target words.