Verbal fluency across the lifespan: The role of cognitive reserve and expression suppression in the first 10-s performance.

Objective: The study examined verbal fluency performance using a 10-s paradigm in young and older adults, focusing on the role of cognitive reserve (CR) and emotion regulation.Method: Thirty-eight young adults and 44 healthy older adults completed phonemic, semantic, and emotional fluency tasks, together with standardized assessments of vocabulary, working memory, CR, and emotion regulation.Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine task-and group-related effects, as well as the contribution of established cognitive predictors (vocabulary, backward digit span, and education).Additional models tested the role of CR and expressive suppression, the latter examined in relation to emotional fluency.Results: Performance differed across fluency types (η 2 p = .39,i.e., semantic > phonemic > emotional) and between age groups (η 2 p = .11),with young adults outperforming older adults.Vocabulary emerged as the strongest predictor (η 2 p = .07),whereas working memory showed only a trend-level effect once lexical knowledge was controlled for (η 2 p = .04).Education did not uniquely predict performance.Within emotional fluency, positive emotions elicited higher accuracy than negative emotions (η 2 p = .03),and older adults were impaired for negative prompts.Expressive suppression negatively predicted emotional fluency accuracy independently of age (η 2 p = .10).Within the older group, higher CR was associated with better overall fluency performance (η 2 p = .11).Conclusions: The 10-s fluency paradigm retains sensitivity to age-related differences while emphasizing rapid, automatic retrieval processes.The results underscore the protective role of CR and identify expressive suppression as a key affective modulator of emotional fluency. Key Points Question:The study examined whether focusing on the first 10 s of verbal fluency performance reveals distinct age effects and individual predictors across the lifespan.Findings: Older adults performed worse even within the first 10 s, with selective impairment for negative emotional fluency, while expressive suppression predicts poorer performance and cognitive reserve acts as a protective factor for overall fluency.Importance: Brief fluency paradigms reveal early age-related differences in lexical retrieval, highlighting the need to account for cognitive reserve and emotion regulation in the interpretation of performance, with important implications for neuropsychological research and clinical assessment.Next Steps: Future studies should leverage direct comparisons between brief and standard fluency paradigms, combine behavioral and neural measures, and test clinical populations to establish early fluency performance as a theoretically and clinically informative marker.