Based on the Competition Model, the present study investigated how adult monolinguals andbilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-à-vis intrasententialcues (animacy and word order). The subjects were L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese and English.The results show that both Chinese and English monolingual controls paid less attention tocontext than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as determinants for Chinese andEnglish sentence processing. Nevertheless, context was found to play a bigger role in Chinesethan in English. As for L2 learners, the main effect of context was significant in all groups oflearners of Chinese and English. However, the Chinese EFL learners relied on context to a greaterextent than did the English CFL learners when processing their respective L2.