Multiple sources of evidence support the idea that reading and visual word identification build upon statistical regularities in the (written) language. However, statistical learning is surely not a language-specific engine, and seems to be deeply embedded into the visual system. This begs the question: how special is letter and word processing, really? In this talk, I'll try to define the connection between statistical learning and reading at the boundary between language and perception, addressing questions like; How does statistical learning affect morphological processing? What's the role of letter co-occurrence statistics in learning to read? How different is string processing in linguistic and non-linguistic animals?