In 2007, I obtained my PhD (cum laude) in Basic Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). That same year, I was invited to apply for a five-year research position at the CIPsi (Psychology Research center, University of Minho [Uminho], Portugal) in a highly competitive call launched by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Research -FCT (Science 2008 FCT program). Since that year, (a) I established a Research group in Bilingualism; and (b) I intensively carried out research on Psycholinguistics (producing more than 200 scientific contributions, including 60 peer-reviewed papers, many of them in high-ranking journals such as Cognition, JEP: LMC, or PLoS One (note that more than a half are in the first quartile and that my work has been cited more than 2400 times, resulting in an h-Index of 24 in google scholar, 21 in Scopus) and a number of other academic activities. (Also note that I have a solid record in attracting competitive funding, having participated in 16 projects, being the Principal Applicant in three out of them. The latter [FP22-2B179] is still on course and aims to examine the impact different L2 learning practices has on children's academic and cognitive achievement). More specifically, I have been studying the cognitive processes and mechanisms that allow humans to acquire and use language in such an impressive (qua effortless) way. Specifically, I have been examining the organization and processing of the bilingual lexicon from a developmental point of view to better understand how second-language learners juggle multiple languages in their minds without any apparent difficulty. In an attempt to present a more integrative view of what is perhaps the leading model of bilingual visual word recognition (i.e, the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus Model -BIA+, Dijkstra et al., 2010; see also its recent update called Multilink, Dijkstra et al., 2018), I have been following a multi-task perspective, encompassing behavioral, eye-tracking and electrophysiological measures. Different levels of analysis (sublexical, lexical and syntactic) have been explored in different bilingual populations with different levels of second language (L2) proficiency with the aim of incorporating a full characterization of the connections between orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning. Indeed, although Multilink is an interesting computational model which incorporate orthographic, phonological, linguistic and non-linguistic context effects and a task-decision component that can account for a wide variety of empirical data, it is not free of shortcomings. These have received my particular attention: a) the clarification of the precise representation and processing of identical (e.g., banana, in English and Spanish), and non-identical cognate words (e.g., paper-papel) in the bilingual memory (see Arana et al., 2022; Comesaña et al., 2012, 2015) as well as the contribution of morphemic units to word recognition (see Comesaña et al., 2018; Fernandes et al., 2023); b) the inability of the model to account for effects of letter transposition on reading (cholocate being easily processed as chocolate, see Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008), or position-specific effects of mismatches of cognates (texto-texte [in Spanish and French, respectively] processed faster than usual-usuel, see Comesaña et al., 2021); and c) the specification of the mechanisms that fit age-related effects on reading (see Valente et al., 2018). Using novel paradigms and comparing bilingual children and adults who speak languages with the same or different alphabetic scripts and who have different levels of L2 proficiency, I expect to find results that contribute to both the theoretical and the applied fields by facilitating a theoretical refinement and a new implementation of Multilink, the development of improved L2 learning methods, and the establishment of better procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders.