[jQuery] Selecting elements WITHOUT children?

[jQuery] Selecting elements WITHOUT children?


Hey all, this is my first time posting to the mailing list, so please,
be gentle. ;)
Anyway, to the point, I have long lists of items similar to the HTML
below
<li><span>Item 1</span></li>
<li><span><a href="htt://link/">Item 2</span></li>
<li><span><a href="#" rel="Text">Item 3</a></span></li>
Now, what I need to do here is be able to select and apply a function
to Item 1, without having the said function cascade and apply to Item
2 and Item 3.
Any one have any idea how I should go about this?
For your reference, here are the selectors I've been using for Item 2
and 3:
$("ul.preview span a")