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ALSPAC – Age 7.5 – Phoneme Deletion Task

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 7.5 sweep (Focus@7) using the Phoneme Deletion Task.

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


Years of data collection:1998-2000
Domain:Verbal ability (language repetition)
Measures:Spelling ability
Oral production and fluency
Communication ability
CHC:Gc (Crystallised Intelligence)
Grw (Reading/Writing)
CLOSER Source:Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Childhood (5 years to 12 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; clinical setting; answers orally
Procedure:Children were presented with a word, and then asked to repeat the word, and then say it again with part of the word missing, e.g. 'sour' without the 's' = 'our'. The task began with 2 practice trials, followed by 40 test trials, each of which increased in difficulty. The number of correctly spoken items was recorded.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Correct items (0 - 40)
Item-level variable(s):Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):f7ws191 – f7ws220
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 7 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives:N = 8,074
Range = 0 - 40
Mean = 20.05
SD = 9.53
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean = 90.5 months, SD = 3.83, Range = 82 - 113
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Rosner, J., & Simon, D. P. (1971). The auditory analysis test: An initial report. Journal of Learning disabilities, 4(7), 384-392.
Technical resources:None
Example articles:Powers, N. R., Eicher, J. D., Butter, F., Kong, Y., Miller, L. L., Ring, S. M., ... & Gruen, J. R. (2013). Alleles of a polymorphic ETV6 binding site in DCDC2 confer risk of reading and language impairment. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 93(1), 19-28.
Eicher, J. D., Powers, N. R., Miller, L. L., Mueller, K. L., Mascheretti, S., Marino, C., ... & Pennington, B. F. (2014). Characterization of the DYX2 locus on chromosome 6p22 with reading disability, language impairment, and IQ. Human Genetics, 133(7), 869-881.

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’.