🗣️ Verbal Fluency Test

What is the verbal fluency test? Verbal fluency tests measure how quickly you can retrieve words from memory under a rule. The classic FAS test (phonemic or letter fluency) asks you to produce words beginning with the letters F, A, and S — one minute per letter. The animal naming test (semantic or category fluency) asks you to name as many animals as possible in one minute.

How to take the test:

• Type each word and press Enter or tap Add (in letter rounds, Space also submits; in the animal round Space lets you type multi-word names)
• Words must be real dictionary words of at least 3 letters (letter rounds)
• Not allowed: proper nouns (names of people, places, brands), numbers, and repeated words
• In the animal round, multi-word animals like polar bear or killer whale count — type the full name and press Enter
• In the Full FAS Test, three rounds run back to back: F, then A, then S

Scoring: Your entries are checked against a dictionary of over 70,000 English words, following standard clinical scoring rules: inflected forms of the same word (farm, farms, farming) count only once, while genuinely different words from the same root (farm vs. farmer) each count. In the animal round, singular and plural of the same animal count once. In standard mode, feedback is withheld until the end (as in clinical administration); switch to Live feedback to see each word judged instantly.

Typical scores (60-second rounds): healthy adults average roughly 12 words per letter (about 36–40 total on the full FAS) and around 20 animals in one minute. Scores vary with age, education, and language background.

Tips:

• Cluster by sound or meaning: fan, fat, far… then switch to a new cluster like flower, forest, field…
• Don't waste time on plurals or -ing forms — variants of a word you already said count only once
• Don't stall on one idea — switching strategies quickly is exactly the executive skill this test trains