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Description: This study aims to investigate the process of lexical borrowing and loan nativization from a neuro-cognitive perspective. Bi-dialectal speakers of Standard Chinese and Shanghainese Chinese performed an EEG experiment on auditory sentence processing. Holistically casted and morpheme-based cross-dialectal loanwords were created and embedded in Shanghainese sentences for comparison. These nonce loanwords were further compared to embedded Shanghainese-specific words, code-switched words, and pre-existing etymologically related words. We also queried the bi-dialectals’ acceptance in Shanghainese for each loanword and each Shanghainese-specific word as an indication of Shanghainese-specific subjective lexical nativeness. Generalized Additive Modelling on EEG signals showed that reduction of lexical acceptance is related to prolonged frontal positive shifts of ERP components. Holistically casted loanwords elicited more P300-like ERP shifts related to form-mismatch and adaptation. However, morpheme-based loanwords elicited more LPC-like ERP shifts related to sentence-level re-analysis, as well as early frontal negative ERP shifts related to lexical integration. Keywords: lexical borrowing, nativeness, code-switching, bilingualism, speech processing, EEG/ERP