Using a translation priming paradigm, the present study aims to explore whether phonology plays a role in the visual word processing of bilinguals by determining if the prime and target relationships (4 types: cognates, non-cognate translations, homophones and baseline) would modulate cross-language priming effects. Four experiments were conducted with unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals as subjects. The results suggest that phonology plays a role in the visual processing of both Chinese and English words, as long as the presentation time of priming stimuli is long enough. Besides, in processing Chinese words, the activation of semantics is stronger than that of phonology, whereas with English words, the activation of phonology precedes that of semantics.