Learners detect probabilistic regularities in linguistic materials (Saffran & Kirham, 2018). In two experiments, we tested if this ability is active in reading and may underlie word learning. Italian speakers were shown letter strings and instructed to distinguish between novel words and foil distractors. Participants successfully detected that novel words complied with the statistics of Italian lexicon, and used this information to perform the task. Interestingly, among the several possible variables, they relied particularly on single bigram frequency.