Introduction
Vocabulary knowledge has been positively and robustly linked to the amount of reading elementary school children do, and yet we are only beginning to investigate how reading might support oral vocabulary acquisition. Central to the current research was the notion that written representations can facilitate oral word learning for those who can read. Considering the complementary nature of spoken and written language, orthography may provide an additional source of analogous information to support oral word learning. For children and adults, hearing novel words in context can result in the creation of phonological representations in memory that are linked to semantic referents. Similarly, reading novel words in context also provides opportunities to acquire orthographic representations and link those representations to semantic referents (Share, 1999). When phonological and orthographic representations co-occur, they may become bonded in the mental lexicon and, therefore, increase the quality of word form representations as well as the availability of their contents (Ehri, 1978; Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Of primary importance for learning, orthographic information might facilitate the encoding of more precise phonological information for literate individuals (Rosenthal & Ehri, 2008). The facilitative effect of print on learning vocabulary might be especially valuable for bilingual learners, whose vocabulary tends to lag behind that of monolingual learners (Bialystok, 2008).