ALSPAC – Age 61 months (5 years) – Short-Term Memory (Non-word Repetition)

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) at 61 months’ age (Children in Focus Clinic) using a measure of Short-term Memory (Nonword Repetition).

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

Year of data collection:	1997-1998
Domain:	Verbal memory
Measures:	Short-term memory
	Memory Span
CHC:	Gsm (Short-term memory)
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; questions answered orally
Procedure:	The child was presented with 40 nonwords (10 each containing 2, 3, 4 and 5 syllables) played on an audio cassette recorder. The child was asked to repeat each item after it was played. The number of correctly repeated words at each syllable length was recorded.
Link to questionnaire:	http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:	Number of correct 2 – 5 syllable words (0 – 10)
	Total number of correct words (0 – 40)
Item-level variable(s):	cf470 – cf476
Total score/derived variable(s):	cf475
Descriptives:	N = 943
	Range = 0 – 35
	Mean = 17.91
	SD = 7.33
	(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (months):	Mean = 67.19, SD = 0.8, Range = 65 – 73
Other sweep and/or cohort:	ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – Short Term Memory (Non-word Repetition)
Source:	Gathercole, S. E., & Baddeley, A. D. (1996). The children’s test of nonword repetition. Pearson.
Technical resources:	None
Example articles:	Gathercole, S. E., Tiffany, C., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., & ALSPAC team. (2005). Developmental consequences of poor phonological short-term memory function in childhood: A longitudinal study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46(6), 598-611.
	Gathercole, S. E., Briscoe, J., Thorn, A., Tiffany, C., & ALSPAC Study Team. (2008). Deficits in verbal long-term memory and learning in children with poor phonological short-term memory skills. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61(3), 474-490.

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.