This study aimed to develop a Vietnamese word recognition test for Taiwanese undergraduate students and to investigate students' performances at different learning stages. The formal test consists of 100 words as test items. With each word, test takers were asked to select the correct Vietnamese word form corresponding to the pronunciation they heard, and its corresponding Chinese meaning. We compiled a pre-test word list first, then after using ITEMAN to analyze the pre-test results, the inappropriate items were filtered out, and left us the final 100 words. 341 students recruited from 14 universities of Taiwan participated in the final test. The results showed that this test can effectively differentiate Vietnamese word recognition ability of students at different learning stages. Students' performance in word sound discrimination is mainly affected by the following factors: 1. knowledge of the correspondence between form and sound; 2. the complexity of the final structure; 3. word frequency; 4. relation to life experience or learning experience; 5. phoneme confusion. Students' performance in word meaning is generally affected by the knowledge of the form sound-meaning correspondence, word familiarity, and part of speech.