The issue of language activation is central to bilinguals’ language processing. By reviewing the studies on language activation in bilinguals’ language comprehension and production at home and abroad, this paper points out that parallel activation and specific 〖JP2〗activation are not mutually exclusive, that both are different variants of language activation observed under different experimental conditions and that parallel activation is the essential feature of bilingual processing while languagespecific activation is the expression under mixed actions by multiple factors, as a result, the future research should further examine these factors.