In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. subject (noun) vs. subject (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress typicality effect, has been shown to facilitate word recognition to native English speakers. However, there is little research on whether it also facilitates word recognition to non-native speakers of English, in particular, to English learners with a tonal first language. To fill this research gap, the present study investigated whether the stress typicality effect modulated word recognition in native speakers of Chinese who learned English as a second language. Both visual grammatical classification and lexical decision tasks were administered to ESL learners with intermediate and advanced English proficiency. The results revealed that Chinese intermediate ESL learners were not sensitive to stress typicality in English; however, the advanced learners were. The findings suggest that different performances in stress assignment among Chinese ESL learners were influenced by their English proficiency levels.