A study investigated the way in which children make use of morphemic information when they are learning to spell. Specifically, it examined the use of morphemic information in spelling compound words; the use made of morphemic information when adding suffixes to words, and the way the morphological rule governing the formation of the past tense is acquired. Subjects, 360 7-to-9-year-old children from 30 schools in Melbourne, Australia, were administered spelling tests over a 3-day period. Results showed that many of the children did not appear to be aware of the significance of the morphemic structure of the words they were asked to spell, and knowing how to spell a morpheme in one context did not ensure that it would be spelled correctly in another. The children's spelling of the irregular past tense morpheme indicated that they were attempting to apply a rule, but for many the rule was difficult to acquire. The bilingual children in the sample, as a group, were less competent than the monolingual children at making use of morphemic information, but the difference was not great, and the error patterns of the two groups were similar. (Author/FL)