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ALSPAC – Age 18 months – GSMD Hearing and Speech Scale

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) at 18 months’ age (Children in Focus Clinic) using the Griffiths Scales of Mental Development (GSMD) Hearing and Speech Scale.

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


Year of data collection:1993-1994
Domain:Hearing and speech ability
Measures:General verbal information
Language development
Lexical knowledge
Listening ability
Communication ability
Oral production and fluency
CHC:Gc (Crystallized Intelligence)
CLOSER Source:Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Early Years (13 months to 4 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; clinical setting; guided play session
Procedure:During a guided play session, several tasks were administered by the interviewer, and the interviewer recorded whether the child could complete each task, e.g. whether the child could turn the pages of the picture book, whether they knew their own name, whether they used clear words, whether they could identify objects in a box of toys, whether they could name the contents of various pictures.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/
Scoring:Standardised DQ (0 - 100)
Item-level variable(s):Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):cf774
cf780

Explore these variables in Discovery: ALSPAC Children in Focus 4Mth-61Mth Clinics Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives:Unadjusted scoreAge adjusted score
N = 1,174N = 1,168
Range = 0 - 36Range = 62.82 - 132.62
Mean = 18.20Mean = 99.84
SD = 4.13SD = 16.11
(click image to enlarge)
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (weeks):Mean = 79.90 weeks, SD = 1.47, Range = 76 - 87
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Griffiths, R. (1970). The abilities of young children. London: Child Development Research Centre.
Technical resources:Griffiths, R. (1970). The abilities of young children. London: Child Development Research Centre.
Example articles:Hibbeln, J. R., Davis, J. M., Steer, C., Emmett, P., Rogers, I., Williams, C., & Golding, J. (2007). Maternal seafood consumption in pregnancy and neurodevelopmental outcomes in childhood (ALSPAC study): an observational cohort study. The Lancet, 369(9561), 578-585.
Pearson, R. M., Heron, J., Melotti, R., Joinson, C., Stein, A., Ramchandani, P. G., & Evans, J. (2011). The association between observed non-verbal maternal responses at 12 months and later infant development at 18 months and IQ at 4 years: A longitudinal study. Infant Behavior and Development, 34(4), 525-533.

For the named items in the table above, links are provided (where applicable) to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery.


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