Sign language is the first language for the deaf, playing a significant role in their cognitive development and daily communication. Fingerspelling is an integral part of sign language, which possessed the characteristics of both sign language and verbal language, and be regarded as the bridge connecting these two different modes of language. At present, numerous research achievements from various perspectives have been made in regard with fingerspelling in English. However, few researches have been carried out when it turns to the Chinese fingerspelling; furthermore, most of the existed studies are mainly adopted the descriptive approaches as the major methodology, and little attention has been paid to further researches on the cognitive processing characteristics of lexical fingerspelling words. In this paper, participants were high middle schools students recruited from deaf schools, aged between 16-23 years old. All the experimental programs were designed by E-prime 2.0 Software. Two experiments (A1, A2) were carried out to explore the effects of encoding ways and the characteristics of lexicalized fingerspelling words on Chinese sign language words process of deaf students. A1: 2 (encoding ways: fingerspelling coding / phonological coding) X 2 (words types: lexicalized fingerspelling words / sign words) within-participants design was used to explore the characteristics of processing different kinds of sign language words. Further, we conducted A2 which consists of 2 (encoding ways: fingerspelling encoding / phonological encoding) × 2 (position of fingerspelling: front / back) × 2 (fingerspelling formation pattern: original / variant) with-participants design. The aim of A 2 was to further explore the encoding modes in processing fingerspelling words with different characteristics, such as position of fingerspelling and the fingerspelling formation pattern. The results are listed as follows :(1) The performance in fingerspelling encoding mode task was more accurate than that in phonological mode task for both types of words, and the respond time in fingerspelling encoding was shorter than in phonological encoding, indicating the preferred encoding mode of deaf students in processing sign language words was fingerspelling; (2) Significant difference due to the types of words was also obtained. Fingerspelling words had higher accuracy rate and shorter reaction time than sign words, showing the processing way among two types words(fingerspelling and sign )might be different for the deaf, and the fingerspelling probably plays an intermediary role in the encoding of sign language word;(3) The interaction effect between position and formation of fingerspelling was also significant, specifically, the processing speed for fingerspelling words with the phoneme in front was significantly faster than those in back; and the performance for fingerspelling words with original formation pattern was better than those with variant formation pattern. To sum up, for deaf students, fingerspelling does work in processing different types of sign language words, which is characterized by the position and formation of fingerspelling and the interaction effect between them.