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ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – Short Term Memory (Non-word Repetition)

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 a Short Term Memory (Non-word Repetition) measure.

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


Years of data collection:1999-2001
Domain:Verbal repetition
Measures:Phonetic Coding
CHC:Gsm (Short term memory)
Ga (Auditory processing)
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; oral answers
Procedure:The child was presented with 12 nonsense words, four each containing 3, 4 and 5 syllables. The words were played on a cassette recorder, and the child was asked to repeat each word after it was played.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:The number of correctly repeated items was scored for each child (0 - 12).
Item-level variable(s):f8sl080 - f8sl105
Total score/derived variable(s):f8sl105
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 7 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)

Descriptives:Raw score
N = 7,361
Range = 0 - 12
Mean = 7.23
SD = 2.51
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127
Other sweep and/or cohort:ALSPAC – Age 5 – Short-Term Memory (Non-word Repetition)
Source:Gathercole, S. E., & Baddeley, A. D. (1996). The children's test of nonword repetition. Pearson.
Technical resources:None
Example articles: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.
Kormos, J., & Sáfár, A. (2008). Phonological short-term memory, working memory and foreign language performance in intensive language learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(2), 261-271.

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’.