The present study examined the possibility that spelling fulfils a self-teaching function in the acquisition of orthographic knowledge because, like decoding, it requires close attention to letter order and identity as well as to word-specific spelling-sound mapping. We hypothesised that: (i) spelling would lead to significant (i.e. above-chance) levels of orthographic learning; (ii) spelling would actually result in superior learning relative to reading owing to the additional processing demands invoked when spelling; (iii) there would be stronger outcomes for post-test spelling production compared with spelling recognition; and (iv) relative to reading, spelling would produce superior orthographic learning in the case of later-occurring orthographic detail compared with information appearing earlier in the letter string. In a fully within-subjects design, third grade Hebrew readers were exposed to novel letter strings presented in three conditions: spelling, reading and an unseen control condition. With the exception of the position by condition interaction (our fourth hypothesis), which, although in the expected direction, failed to attain significance, all hypotheses were supported. These data highlight yet another dimension of reading-writing reciprocity by suggesting that spelling offers a powerful selfteaching tool in the compilation of word-specific orthographic representations.The acquisition of orthographic knowledge, whether represented in localist (e.g. Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon & Ziegler, 2001) or distributed architectures (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg & Patterson, 1996), is agreed to be one of the cornerstones of literacy. This knowledge consists of both word-specific orthographic representations critical for rapid automatised word recognition (and proficient spelling) and generalised (i.e. productive) knowledge of orthographic conventions (Siegel, Share & Geva, 1995). According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Jorm & Share, 1983;Share, 1995), this knowledge is accumulated largely via the process of phonologically recoding (i.e. decoding) novel letter strings -all letter strings being unfamiliar at some point. Each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar letter string is assumed not only to enable the reader to identify unfamiliar words independently but also, perhaps more importantly, to provide an opportunity to acquire and consolidate word-specific (and general) orthographic information. This exhaustive (or near-exhaustive) decoding process 1 is held to be critical in forming well-specified orthographic representations because it draws attention to the order and identity of letters and how they map phonological representations. In a sense then, the decoding process helps the reader see the 'logic' of a word's spelling, that is, the spelling-sound mapping. Thus, phonological

Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components.

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