In order to examine the existence of inhibitory control at the lexical retrieval of Chinese and English bilinguals, the current study adopted 3(inhibitory control capacity: high, mid and low) ×2(switch condition: switch and non switch) ×2 (switch order: L1-L2 and L2-L1) ×2(repetition condition: interval and immediate) mixed research design and a verbal fluency task paradigm in which the participants were required to produce Chinese beginning with phoneme /l/,/j/,/y/,/d/,/b/,/t/ or English words starting with/s/,/k/, /p/,/d/,/b/,/t/ according to the colour cues (red means using English, blue means using Chinese and the color cues were counter-balanced). The results showed 1) in the fluency task, compared with switching to L2, when switching to L1, the participants’ suffering in Chinese lexical retrieval was more obvious. And hence asymmetrical switch cost of lexical retrieval was obtained; 2) a significant correlation was observed between inhibitory control capacity and lexical switch cost. Inhibitory control had a significant effect on switch cost. These results supported that inhibitory control had an important role in lexical retrieval and it worked at the lexical level of bilingual language production.