Phonological priming with cross-modal picture-word interference task was used to in-vestigate the phonological processing in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Sixteen children with DLD aged 4 to 6 years and 11 months, and 16 gender- and age-matched children with typical development (TD) were recruited. The target words were paired with 6 types of phonological primes (identical, syllable-related, onset-related, rhyme-related, tone-related, unrelated), and primes were presented 150ms before (SOA -150), simultaneously (SOA 0), or 150ms after (SOA +150) the target. Results showed that (1) the TD group performed faster and more accurately than the DLD group; (2) both groups demonstrated syllable priming and lack tone priming at all SOAs, which suggests children selected a syllable frame in the lexical access process and the contribution of tone is limited; (3) the primary differences between these two groups were at sub-syllabic level. The DLD group exhibited rhyme priming at SOA -150 and SOA +150, while the TD group only ex-hibited onset interference at SOA 0. Based on these results, the possible inference was that children with TD may apply Cohort model to perceive incoming phonological information, however, children with DLD may not utilize this manner or they were not mature enough to use it, and their word retrieval process depended on high-saliency rhyme. Overall, the phonological processing in children with DLD was inefficient, and they revealed word re-trieval difficulty. Thus, it is recommended to evaluate and intervene word retrieval and phonological processing in children with DLD.