The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8.5 sweep (Focus@8) using the Oral Expression measure from the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD).
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs, are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal expression |
| Measures: | Use of non imitative expressive language |
| Descriptive skills | |
| Narrative skills | |
| Sequencing skills | |
| CHC: | Crystallised intelligence (Gc) |
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; oral answers |
| Procedure: | The WOLD has two subtests that measure expressive language, both of which were administered at age 8. In the first test, the child was shown a series of pictures and asked to describe them, with responses coded correct or incorrect |
| The second part of the subtest consisted of three tasks: | |
| i. The child was presented with a picture of a scene, and asked to describe the scene to someone who has not and cannot see the picture. | |
| ii. The child was shown a map, and asked to give directions (shortest route possible) from one location to another | |
| iii. They were tasked with explaining the process of putting batteries into a torch using a series of picture-based instructions. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | Responses were taped and coded for relevance, accuracy and logic (ongoing at the time of writing; only responses to the first sub-test were available). |
| Item-level variable(s): | f8sl050 - f8sl076 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | None |
| Descriptives: | Not available at time of writing |
| Age of participants: | Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Rust, J. (1996). The manual of the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD) UK Edition. London: The Psychological Corporation. |
| Technical resources: | None. |
| Reference examples: | Taylor, A. E., Guthrie, P. A., Smith, G. D., Golding, J., Sattar, N., Hingorani, A. D., ... & Day, I. N. (2011). IQ, educational attainment, memory and plasma lipids: associations with apolipoprotein E genotype in 5995 children. Biological Psychiatry, 70(2), 152-158. |
| Hameed, M. A., Lewis, A. J., Sullivan, S., & Zammit, S. (2013). Child literacy and psychotic experiences in early adolescence: findings from the ALSPAC study. Schizophrenia Research, 145(1-3), 88-94. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in ALSPAC
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.