Even after achieving a high level of English proficiency, our accents – along with involuntary code-switching, pronunciation of English words as they are pronounced in our native tongue, and more – may still give us away as EFLs. Accent is the most immediately noticeable feature of EFL speakers. After moving to North America, I was faced with a conflict: Should I preserve my foreign accent and embrace it as part of my identity or try to pass as an American? While the perception that all accents are valid is true, it is also – to some extent – naïve. It not only ignores the desire to assimilate into American culture but also minimizes the impact of implicit biases, which can go as far as labeling people with foreign accents as less competent. Another practical reason to develop a North American accent is to adjust to personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa that often fail to understand foreign accents. At the same time as the world is becoming more progressive and inclusive, language technology sometimes inadvertently pushes us a step back.

Automatic translation tools like Google Translate have improved immensely in recent years. Older translation technology selected the sentence that sounded more natural in the target language among multiple prospective word-by-word translations. Conversely, the current tools learn a sentence-level translation function from human translations. Although they are very useful, automatic translation tools don’t work equally well for every pair of languages and every genre and topic. For this reason, automatic translation didn’t yet make second language acquisition obsolete. Mastering English means being able to think in English rather than translating your thoughts from your native language. The language of our thoughts affects our word choice and grammatical constructions, so going through another language might result in incorrect or unnatural sentences. Choosing the right English words involves obstacles such as mispronunciation, malapropism, and inappropriate contexts.

Over the last ten years, research on groups of infants and toddlers acquiring more than one language from birth has grown rapidly, though it still trails the research on infants learning just one language. This chapter discusses behavioural and neurophysiological findings about how bilinguals perceive spoken language in the first three years of life. This research demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual infants use similar core mechanisms to learn from differing linguistic input. Crucially, comparing their acquisition trajectories allows us to make inferences about the early linguistic representations of bilingual infants.