In this talk, Stanislav Mulík would first like to introduce himself to the CLS community by going through my unconventional academic journey. His work experience as a language teacher left him wondering about how monolingual and bilingual people learn words in their languages, and how this knowledge affects language processing at the phonological level; these questions have guided the directions of his research in the last decade. In the second part of the talk, He will share a study that suggests that bilinguals are equally able to learn novel words in an L3 through translation either from their dominant L1 or from their L2, and a follow-up EEG study that revealed important differences between L1 and L2 in the underlying neural mechanisms of phonological facilitation during L3 vocabulary learning. The third part will focus on Mexican Indigenous bilingualism, namely on a psycho- and neurolinguistic study of speech perception in adult Spanish-dominant heritage speakers of Hñäñho (Otomi from Santiago Mexquititlán). Then, he implemented eye-tracking to investigate the processes related to novel word learning in a study with Mexican Indigenous toddlers, which also revealed links between mothers’ language dominance, the amount of children’s exposure to the Indigenous language, and their bilingual vocabulary composition. The final part of the talk will consist of an overview of the studies he is currently involved in at Penn State, and he will conclude by motivating conversations about sampling biases in psycholinguistics research worldwide towards certain populations.