Skip to content
Closer - The home of longitudinal research

BCS70 – Age 46-47 – Verbal Fluency (Animal Naming) Test

The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 46-47 sweep using the Verbal Fluency (Animal Naming) Test.

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


Domain:Verbal fluency
Measures:Verbal/semantic fluency
Executive function
CHC:Glr (Long-Term Storage and Retrieval)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; CAPI
Procedure:Participants were asked to name as many different animals as possible within a one-minute timeframe. The interviewer made a note of each named animal and entered the total number into the CAPI programme. Repetitions, named animals (e.g. Bambi), and redundancies (e.g. white cat, black cat) were not included in the total score.
Link to questionnaire:https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BCS70_collated-CAPI-specs_FINAL.pdf (opens in new tab)
Scoring:Total number of animals named
Item-level variable(s):None
Total score/derived variable(s):B10CFANI
Descriptives:Raw score
N = 8,498
Range = 1 - 70
Mean = 23.63
SD = 6.19
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):Mean = 563.26, SD = 8.26, Range = 542 - 578
Other sweep and/or cohort:NCDS – Age 50 – Verbal Fluency (Animal Naming) Test
NCDS – Age 61-63 – Proposed repeat of tests at age 50
NSHD – Age 53 – Verbal Fluency (Animal Naming) Test
ALSPAC – Focus on Mothers 2 – Verbal Fluency Test
ALSPAC – Focus on Mothers 3 – Verbal Fluency Test
ALSPAC – Focus on Mothers 4 – Verbal Fluency Test
Source:Taken from Section B (cognitive assessment) of the Cambridge Mental Disorders of the Elderly Examination (CAMDEX) (Roth et al., 1986). Cognitive measures at this sweep were taken from the 2002 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA; Taylor et al., 2007).
Technical resources:Banks, J., Breeze, E., Lessof, C., & Nazroo, J. (2006). Retirement, health and relationships of the older population in England: The 2004 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Wave 2).
Reference examples:Not available at time of writing

Go to:


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