By conducting the true-pseudo words judgment task, this study examined the time course of Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals recognizing Chinese characters and words as their second language. The results show that: (1) the time course of Tibetan–Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese character recognition basically follows the same order: semantic, phonological, and graphic information; (2) Language proḀciency does not have an impact on the process of Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals recognizing Chinese words. The entire study suggests that the time course of Chinese word recognition differs between Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals and native Chinese speakers. In other words, the second language processing of bilingual individuals diᴀers from that of native speakers. These research findings prompt us to delve deeper into the study of second language processing in bilingual individuals and have significant implications for bilinguals’ second language teaching.