In a study published earlier this year in Psychological Science, a team of researchers reported a link between verbal fluency and mortality risk. The multinational group, led by Paolo Ghisletta of the University of Geneva, made use of data from the Berlin Aging Study.

Between 1990 and 2009, investigators assessed the cognitive abilities of more than 500 participants who were 70 years or older when the study began. Specifically, the researchers measured their “perceptual speed, episodic memory, verbal fluency, and verbal knowledge” (Ghisletta and colleagues, 2025, p. 90). All of the study’s participants are now deceased, and researchers can use the results from the cognitive battery to see if any of these measures are predictive of the participants’ lifespans.

Since many factors affect longevity, Ghisletta’s team used statistical techniques to control for factors like gender, socioeconomic status, educational level, and whether participants might be suffering from dementia. Their goal was to see whether specific aspects of cognition are associated with longevity.

Somewhat surprisingly, out of the four cognitive measures mentioned above, only one was related to decreased mortality: verbal fluency. Specifically, Ghisletta and his collaborators found “an almost nine-year predicted difference in median survival time between the… study participants with high versus low values on verbal fluency” (p. 96).

What exactly is verbal fluency, and how is it measured? Simply put, verbal fluency refers to how quickly people can produce words when asked to provide terms that match specific criteria.

Specifically, participants in the Berlin Aging Study had been assessed on two measures of fluency. One of these was categories, and this involved naming as many animals as they could think of in ninety seconds (such as aardvark, lion, hippopotamus, and so forth).

The second measure was word beginnings. In this task, participants were urged to produce as many words as they could think of starting with the letter “s” (such as sea, shepherd, or surely) in 90 seconds.

Language, however, is a multifaceted cognitive ability. And the study’s other linguistic construct, verbal knowledge, was not associated with longevity. The participants’ verbal knowledge had been measured in two ways: in terms of vocabulary (providing definitions for 20 words), and performance on a spot-a-word task (identifying a real word when presented in the company of four pronounceable non-words).

It’s important to understand what can and cannot be concluded from studies of this kind. Because the findings are correlational, it’s not possible to conclude that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between verbal fluency and longevity. The reverse could even be true: something about longevity itself might facilitate verbal fluency.

It may also be the case that some third, unmeasured variable—or perhaps many of them—are responsible for both greater verbal fluency and a longer lifespan.

However, the study by Ghisletta’s team echoes earlier research on this topic. In 2016, for example, researchers found an association between reading and longevity. A group at the Yale University School of Public Health found that participants who read books had a 23-month “survival advantage” compared to non-readers.

In addition, this association persisted even after a host of other variables, such as “age, sex, race, education, comorbidities, self-rated health, wealth, marital status, and depression” were controlled for (Bavishi and colleagues, 2016, p. 44).

But how much reading was necessary for such an association to be observed? The researchers found that reading for an average of just 30 minutes a day was sufficient for the activity to be associated with a survival advantage.

An important caveat, however, is that the strongest association in this study was found for participants who predominantly read books as opposed to newspapers and magazines. The authors asserted that “most of the book readers in our study were reading fiction” (p. 47), so it may be that only certain types of reading are associated with longevity.

Why might reading fiction confer advantages not seen with reading factual material? One possibility is that the labor required to create a fictional world in one’s head, along with the effort required to keep track of who said what, and who knows what, can have salutary cognitive effects (Kreuz and Roberts, 2019).

Another study published earlier this year suggests additional benefits of reading, over and above an association with longevity. Nicola Currie and her coauthors in the U.K. interviewed older adults who are avid readers of fiction.

The responses from their informants included the themes of positive affect associated with reading; a connection to books and their friends and family; and personal growth, such as facilitating reflection and promoting empathy (Currie, Wilkinson, and McGeown, 2025).

The cultivation of one’s verbal fluency and the reading of fiction are not elixirs that can magically stave off the effects of aging on the mind and body. But evidence is accumulating that specific cognitive abilities and behaviors are associated with a host of benefits, including a longer lifespan.