Visual word identification is the process that allows the brain to recognize a familiar and meaningful word from an ordered collection of letters. Chunking seems to play an important role in this process: rather than jumping from single letters to words, the brain seems to group letters in smaller units. Some recent studies suggest to oust morphemes, the smallest meaning-bearing units in language, from their role as building blocks in chunking: they should instead be replaced by letter chunks which do not necessarily have an explicit connection with semantics, but which could be explained by statistical regularities in letter co-occurence. However, the exact principles according to which these chunks emerge in skilled readers are still unclear.