The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) at 61 months’ age (Children in Focus Clinic) using the Bus Story measure.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal expression | |
| Measures: | Language development | |
| Verbal expression | ||
| Listening ability | ||
| Communication ability | ||
| Oral production and fluency | ||
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallised Intelligence) | |
| Glr (Long-Term Storage and Retrieval) | ||
| Administration method: | Trained interviewer; clinical setting; answered orally | |
| Procedure: | The interviewer read aloud a story (accompanied with pictures) about a naughty bus. The child was then required to retell the story, using the pictures as support. The child's version was recorded, and scored for information content and sentence length. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | Marks were awarded for information (0 - 55) and sentence length (0 - 20). | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not readily available. | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | cf466 - cf468 | |
| Descriptives: | Information score | Sentence length |
| N = 823 | N = 772 | |
| Range = 1 - 52 | Range = 3 - 20 | |
| Mean = 27.38 | Mean = 9.45 | |
| SD = 11.11 | SD = 2.53 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 67.19, SD = 0.8, Range = 65 - 73 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None | |
| Source: | Renfrew, C.E. (1997). Bus Story Test: A test of narrative speech. 4th edition. UK: Winslow Press Ltd. | |
| Technical resources: | None | |
| Reference examples: | Hughes, C., Dunn, J., & White, A. (1998). Trick or treat?: Uneven understanding of mind and emotion and executive dysfunction in 'hard-to-manage' preschoolers. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 39(7), 981-994. | |
| Clegg, J., Law, J., Rush, R., Peters, T. J., & Roulstone, S. (2015). The contribution of early language development to children's emotional and behavioural functioning at 6 years: an analysis of data from the Children in Focus sample from the ALSPAC birth cohort. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(1), 67-75. | ||
For 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:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in ALSPAC
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.