Test 1
Speak as many fruit names as you can in thirty seconds.

Test 2
In thirty seconds, speak as many words as you can that start with the letter B.

If you are doing these tests on your own, you will need to make a tally mark for each word that you produce and then count up your tallies at the end. Tallying your words is obviously going to slow you down to some extent. If another person is timing you, ask them to count your output by making a tally mark for each word that you produce. After doing each test, you can then turn the tables on them and switch roles.

Being able to produce 10-15 words in 30 seconds shows a reasonable level of fluency.

It is unlikely that you were able to produce exactly the same number of words for each test. There is some research that shows that different parts of the brain are involved in these two different tasks.

Age is clearly a significant factor that affects performance; younger children tend to be less fluent than older children and adults. This has a lot to do with how many words are in a person’s vocabulary.

One important aspect of verbal fluency is having a large vocabulary of words to draw on. But a large word store is not all that is involved; you also need to be able to search rapidly through your vocabulary, find a word that fits the task, speak it and then repeat this until you run out of time. Some people speak much faster than others, some are quicker than others at searching for the right words and some are better at repeating the same thing over and over again! Being able to name lots of fruit also depends on the amount of experience that you have had with different fruits. So this test of verbal fluency is actually measuring quite a few different things.