Statistical learning (SL) is a widely employed experimental paradigm that does not directly depend on the participant’s knowledge of a language, but appears to predict language and literacy outcomes for children and adults. However, research linking SL and literacy has not addressed children who first learn to read in a second language acquisition context, a very common circumstance in primary education worldwide. We revisit two studies that linked visual and auditory SL with childhood literacy in Australia and the US, proposing a pre-registered replication in the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, where primary school students are educated in French and speak a local language at home. We plan to recruit 103 children (more than double previous samples) who are already participating in a broader French literacy evaluation to complete visual and auditory SL tasks. We aim to test the previously reported correlations >0.3 between SL and literacy with 90% power.