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ALSPAC – Age 5 – Initial Consonants Detection Test

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) at 61 months’ age (Children in Focus Clinic) using the Initial Consonants Detection Test.

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


Domain:Reading ability
Measures:Reading decoding
Spelling ability
Grw (Reading/Writing)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; clinical setting; pen and paper
Procedure:Children were presented with 10 lists of three words, and were asked to identify which two of three words began with the same initial consonants. The number of correct responses was recorded.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Total number of correct word pairs selected (0 - 10)
Item-level variable(s):Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):cf445 - cf449
Descriptives:Raw score
N = 983
Range = 0 - 10
Mean = 8.27
SD = 2.04
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean = 67.19, SD = 0.8, Range = 65 - 73
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Byrne, B., & Fielding-Barnsley, R. (1993). Recognition of phoneme invariance by beginning readers. Reading and Writing, 5(3), 315-324.
Technical resources:None
Reference examples:Gathercole, S. E., Tiffany, C., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., & ALSPAC team. (2005). Developmental consequences of poor phonological short-term memory function in childhood: A longitudinal study. Journal of child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46(6), 598-611.
Gathercole, S. E., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., Tiffany, C., & ALSPAC Study Team. (2008). Deficits in verbal long-term memory and learning in children with poor phonological short-term memory skills. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(3), 474-490.

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’.