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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.


Domain:Verbal expression
Measures:Use of non imitative expressive language
Descriptive skills
Narrative skills
Sequencing skills
CHC:Crystallised intelligence (Gc)
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
Total score/derived variable(s):None
Descriptives:Not available at time of writing
Age of participants: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.
Reference examples: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’.