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ALSPAC – Age 9 – Sentence Decision Task

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 9 sweep (Focus@9) using the Sentence Decision Task.

Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.


Domain:Verbal (reading)
Measures:General (verbal) information comprehension
Reading comprehension
Reading decoding
CHC:Crystallized intelligence (Gc)
Reading/Writing (Grw)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper
Procedure:Administered primarily to children who greatly struggled with the NARA II. Children were presented with a series of 39 sentences, some of them describing something that is true (e.g. "Birds have wings") and some of them describing things that are false (e.g. "Birds wear shoes"). The child was asked to read the sentence and indicate with a tick or a cross if they felt that the sentence was true or false. The child was shown two examples that had already been completed and was then given a further four as practice trials.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Total number of correct responses (0 - 39)
Item-level variable(s):Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):f9sd060, f9sd072
Descriptives:Raw score
N = 600
Range = 20 - 39
Mean = 38.71
SD = 0.95
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants:Mean = 118.49 months, SD = 3.89, Range = 105 - 140
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Designed specifically for study
Technical resources:None
Reference examples:Unknown

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.


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This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.