The study adopted a oneway(concreteness of nouns: abstract, halfabstract and concrete) withinsubject design and the decision task of emotional valence in order to explore the concreteness effect of Chinese EFL learners’ processing of English negative nouns. Results showed that abstract negative nouns were processed faster and much more accurate than concrete negative nouns. Moreover, the peak amplitude of N400 component was elicited under the three conditions, in which there was the largest N400 amplitude elicited by concrete negative nouns, and a larger N400 amplitude elicited by halfabstract negative nouns than that of abstract negative nouns.These results suggested that concreteness of words exerted great influence on Chinese EFL learners’ processing of English negative nouns, and provided electrophysiological evidence to the existence of halfabstract nouns, thus breaking the dichotomy between abstract and concrete nouns.