Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cross-categorial innovations, such as nouns used as verbs, are a productive source of polysemy in language. Although such innovative forms are typically interpreted with ease, little is known about their neural processing. This study investigates the neural correlates of innovative denominal verbs during naturalistic sentence reading. Using concurrent eye-tracking and EEG, we compared innovative denominal verbs with their base nouns and with conventionalized verbs, allowing innovation-related effects to be distinguished from general noun–verb differences. EEG signals were time-locked to the first fixation on the critical word. Innovative denominal verbs elicited a reliable left-anterior negative-going effect in the 300–500 ms time window relative to both control conditions, which extended into the 500–800 ms interval. No evidence was found for an ELAN or P600. We argue that the observed sustained negativity reflects increased demands on semantic-pragmatic integration and context-dependent meaning construction, rather than morphosyntactic anomaly processing.