Reading unfamiliar words requires knowledge of regularities underlying the
orthography. Here, we test a causal chain which aims to explain individual differences in
reading ability. Reading aloud new words is likely to depend on the knowledge of higher-order
regularities about the print-to-speech mapping (e.g., in English, that an ‚a‘ is pronounced /ɔ/
when it follows a ‚w‘). This, in turn, is likely to depend on the ability to extract such regularities.
The ability to extract orthography-related regularities may be driven by statistical learning ability,
which refers to the efficiency of a domain-general mechanism which extracts regularities. We
test the plausibility of this causal chain with a correlational design, with 60 adult participants. If
such a relationship holds, we expect to find support for the presence of correlations (1) between
pseudoword reading ability and use of implicitly learned print-to-speech regularities in a different
pseudoword reading aloud task, (2) between the use of such implicitly learned regularities and
the ability to extract them from a novel, artificial orthography, and (3) between the ability to
extract novel orthography-related regularities and domain-general statistical learning ability. We
find partial evidence for the pre-registered causal chain.