This study investigated the processing of English regular and irregular verbs by Chinese EFL learners with a masked priming task. The results showed that their response accuracy of high-frequency verbs was higher than that of low-frequency verbs, and their response time of high-frequency verbs was shorter than that of low-frequency verbs. Regular nonce verbs did not show phonological similarity effects, but irregular ones did. Decomposition was evidenced for the low-frequency regular verbs and regular nonce verbs, but not for the irregular verbs and the high-frequency regular verbs. In addition, regularity did not seem to play a role in their processing of English regular and irregular verbs. The results indicate that the Chinese EFL learners in the present study processed irregular verbs and high-frequency regular verbs with memory, but low-frequency regular verbs and regular nonce verbs with computation, which supports the dual-mechanism theories.