A Review of Research on The Neural Mechanisms of Lexical Tone Acquisition

Abstract

The phenomenon of bilingualism is becoming more and more important as international communication becomes closer and closer. In the past, linguists' studies on second language acquisition by bilinguals seldom dealt with the language processing mechanism of the human brain itself, but the further development of science and technology has made it possible to quantify the laws of language learning at the neural level. In this paper, the author reviews the literature on the brain-neural mechanisms of tone perception in the primary stage of bilinguals from the perspectives of native language and bilingual tone perception in light of the previous research results. At present, the main research methods adopted in the study of tone acquisition are phonological experimental research and listening and dialectic research. However, the research on tone perception mostly focuses on differentiation and recognition experiments, the use of neuroscience technology is still insufficient, and the combination between disciplines is not close enough.