Abstract

Previous studies have indicated that people tend to believe that a name belongs to a person if that person's face shape matches the lip shape formed while pronouncing their name. However, the mechanism underlying this mapping effect remains unclear. In this study, participants were asked to wear different lip models and judge whether the name belonged to the corresponding face shape. The results showed that participants tended to associate ambiguous names with round faces in the round-lip-experience condition and with pointed faces in the flat-lip-experience condition. The event-related potentials showed that a more negative N400 component was induced under incongruent conditions than under congruent conditions, in which the experienced lip shape was consistent with the face shape. This suggests that the lip-shape experience enabled the participants to abstract shape concepts, thereby modulating the matching of names and faces. This not only supports the viewpoint of shared conceptual properties, but also posits embodied cognition as a potential mechanism underlying name--face mapping.