Skip to content
Closer - The home of longitudinal research

ALSPAC – Age 12.5 – Phonological Awareness (Spoonerisms)

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 12.5 sweep (TeenFocus 1) using a measure of Phonological Awareness (Spoonerisms).

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


Year of data collection:2004
Domain:Phonological processing
Measures:Metaphonological skill (phonological awareness)
CHC:Unknown
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 played a series of two words (e.g. Paddington Bear) and was asked to repeat them, with the first sounds swapped around (e.g. Baddington Pear). Used as a screener for dyslexia.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Response time (seconds) and number of errors are recorded
Item-level variable(s):Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s):ff4270 – ff8923
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Teen Focus 1/Teen Focus 1 FastTrack Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives:Time in seconds to complete first trial
N = 1,998
Range = 0 - 35
Mean = 2.71
SD = 2.92
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean (months) = 153.73, SD = 2.77, Range = 136 - 171
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Similar to the spoonerism test from the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB; Gallagher, A., & Frederickson, N. (1995). The Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB): An initial assessment of its theoretical and practical utility. Educational and Child Psychology, 12(1), 53-67.
Technical resources:None
Example articles:Unknown

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.


Go to:


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