Attribute-head construction is one of the most universal as well as the most complex constructions in natural languages. This type of construction is denominated as compound on lexical level whereas as modifier-head phrase on syntactic level. In perspective of the category by the modifier (attribute) and the head in the construction, the construction can be classified into three subtypes, i.e., N-N (for noun-noun)construction, V-N(for verb-noun)construction and A-N(for adjective-noun) construction. Our literature review shows that the theoretical study of the construction takes a longer history and has achieved a greater number of achievements than its experiment-based cognitive processing study (which initiated in 1970s) in both research depth and width. Compared with the languages like English and its like, the research on Chinese lags much more behind in this regard. One of the goals for neurolinguistics is to explore how linguistic units especially the complicated ones are represented, stored and retrieved in human’s brain. On this account, an initial study of attribute-head construction universally existing in natural languages undoubtedly provides an important window for the exploration of complex syntactic constructions’ processing mechanism . This paper reviews what has been achieved in the processing study of the construction so that Chinese audience have a deeper understanding of the concerned research and Chinese scholars can make some reference to it in their upcoming studies of Chinese attribute-head constructions. The sources adopted in this writing come mainly from the studies of normal adults’ language processing, in addition to the data from children’s language acquisition and aphasic patients’ clinic investigation. The results show that (1) behaviour method (generally measuring reaction time and response accuracy) is the major way in the processing study of the construction but some new methods in cognitive neuroscience like ERP and fMRI has been adopted in recent years; (2) more studies were conducted in the processing of attribute-head compounds while relatively less conducted in the processing of attribute-head phrases; (3) by comparison, the majority of researches are found in N-N construction, followed in turn by A-N construction and V-N construction. As a result, a lot of hypotheses on attribute-head construction’s processing have been proposed on the basis of compounds’ study; (4) the construction’s processing is affected by a number of common factors, among which are transparency and frequency of the components and the construction itself, inter-components’ semantic compatibility and segmentality, and their kind. Those factors are each negatively correlated with the construction’s processing difficulty, i.e., the higher the indexes regarding the factors are, the lower the processing difficulty is; and (5) the three subtypes of constructions show their respective unique features in one way or another, namely, the double dissociation between nouns and verbs finds its stage on N-N construction; the acquisition of adjectives is based on the proceeding knowledge of nouns children have obtained, which explains why A-N construction is more close between components cognitively; N-N construction’s processing is concerned with the selection from multiple semantic relationships between two entity concepts, and hence consumes more cognitive resources, leading to greater processing difficulty.