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ALSPAC – Age 9 – Word and Non-word Reading

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 Word and Non-word Reading measures.

Details on these measures and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.


Years of data collection:2001-2003
Domain:Reading ability
Measures:Verbal expression
Lexical knowledge
Pronunciation
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; oral answers
Procedure:This test consisted of 10 real words, and 10 nonwords. The words were presented to the child in a booklet and the child was asked to read aloud each word.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Number of correct words (0 - 10 real words; 0 - 10 nonwords).
Item-level variable(s):f9mw020 - f9mw073
Total score/derived variable(s):f9mw031, f9mw032, f9mw061, f9mw062
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 9 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)

Descriptives:VerbalNon-verbal
N = 7,650N = 7,637
Range = 0 - 10Range = 0 - 10
Mean = 7.49Mean = 5.20
SD = 2.49SD = 2.50
(click image to enlarge)
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean = 118.49 months, SD = 3.89, Range = 105 - 140
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Nunes, T., Bryant, P., & Olsson, J. (2003). Learning morphological and phonological spelling rules: An intervention study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(3), 289-307.
Technical resources:None
Example articles:Bath, S. C., Steer, C. D., Golding, J., Emmett, P., & Rayman, M. P. (2013). Effect of inadequate iodine status in UK pregnant women on cognitive outcomes in their children: results from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). The Lancet, 382(9889), 331-337.
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.


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