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ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – WOLD Oral Expression

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 the Oral Expression measure from the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD).

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 expression
Measures:Use of non imitative expressive language
Descriptive skills
Narrative skills
Sequencing skills
CHC:Gc (Crystallised intelligence)
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 WOLD has two subtests that measure expressive language, both of which were administered at age 8. In the first test, the child was shown a series of pictures and asked to describe them, with responses coded correct or incorrect
The second part of the subtest consisted of three tasks:
i. The child was presented with a picture of a scene, and asked to describe the scene to someone who has not and cannot see the picture.
ii. The child was shown a map, and asked to give directions (shortest route possible) from one location to another
iii. They were tasked with explaining the process of putting batteries into a torch using a series of picture-based instructions.
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Responses were taped and coded for relevance, accuracy and logic (ongoing at the time of writing; only responses to the first sub-test were available).
Item-level variable(s):f8sl050 – f8sl076
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus at 8 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Total score/derived variable(s):None
Descriptives:Not available at time of writing
Age of participants (months):Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Rust, J. (1996). The manual of the Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD) UK Edition. London: The Psychological Corporation.
Technical resources:None.
Example articles:Taylor, A. E., Guthrie, P. A., Smith, G. D., Golding, J., Sattar, N., Hingorani, A. D., ... & Day, I. N. (2011). IQ, educational attainment, memory and plasma lipids: associations with apolipoprotein E genotype in 5995 children. Biological Psychiatry, 70(2), 152-158.
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’.