The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 68-70 sweep using the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III (ACE-III): Language Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal (language ability) |
| Measures: | Language comprehension |
| Lexical knowledge | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallized Intelligence) |
| Administration method: | Research nurse. Mostly conducted using ACEmobile app, installed on iPad, with prompts to guide interviewer through the process. Pen and paper used where necessary (e.g. drawing tests). |
| Procedure: | First, participants were handed a pencil and paper and asked to follow three commands: (i) "Place the paper on top of the pencil”, (ii) “Pick up the pencil but not the paper”, (iii) "Ask the subject to “Pass me the pencil after touching the paper” (0 - 3) |
| Second, they are asked to write two complete sentences about his/her last holiday/weekend/Christmas (0 - 2) | |
| Third, they were asked to repeat the words: 'caterpillar’; ‘eccentricity; ‘unintelligible’; ‘statistician’ (0 - 2) | |
| Fourth, they were asked to repeat the saying ‘All that glitters is not gold’ (0 - 1) | |
| Fifth, they were asked to repeat the saying ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ (0 - 1) | |
| Sixth, they were shown 12 pictures and asked to name them (0 - 12) | |
| Seventh, they were asked to point to certain pictures, e.g. “Which picture relates to the monarchy” (0 - 4) | |
| Finally, they were asked to read aloud 5 irregular words, e.g. ‘sew’, ‘pint’ (0 - 1) | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=mrepo:ace-iii.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | One or two points per correct answer (0 - 26) |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | ACELANGTOT15x |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 1,765 | |
| Range = 16 - 26 | |
| Mean = 25.27 | |
| SD = 1.17 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 834.14, SD = 2.93, Range = 828 - 848 |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | None |
| Source: | Mathuranath, P. S., Nestor, P. J., Berrios, G. E., Rakowicz, W., & Hodges, J. R. (2000). A brief cognitive test battery to differentiate Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia. Neurology, 55(11), 1613-1620. |
| Technical resources: | Noone, P. (2015). Addenbrooke's cognitive examination-III. Occupational Medicine, 65(5), 418-420. |
| Reference examples: | Matías-Guiu, J. A., Valles-Salgado, M., Rognoni, T., Hamre-Gil, F., Moreno-Ramos, T., & Matías-Guiu, J. (2017). Comparative diagnostic accuracy of the ACE-III, MIS, MMSE, MoCA, and RUDAS for screening of Alzheimer Disease. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 43(5-6), 237-246. |
| James, S. N., Davis, D., O'Hare, C., Sharma, N., John, A., Gaysina, D., ... & Richards, M. (2018). Lifetime affective problems and later-life cognitive state: Over 50 years of follow-up in a British birth cohort study. Journal of Affective Disorders, 241, 348-355. |
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NSHD
- Overview of adulthood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.