We propose a new method for annotating verbal fluency data, which allows the reliable detection of the age-related decline of lexical access capacity. The main innovation is that annotators should inferentially assess the intention of the speaker when producing a word form during a verbal fluency test. Our method correlates probable speaker inten-tions such as “intended as a valid answer” or “intended as a meta-comment” with lin-guistic features such as word intensity (e.g. reduced intensity suggests private speech) and syntactic integration. The annotation scheme can be implemented with high reliabil-ity, and minimal linguistic training. When fluency data are annotated using this scheme, a relation between fluency and age emerges; this is in contrast to a strict implementation of the traditional method of annotating verbal fluency data, which has no way of deal-ing with score-confounding phenomena because it force-groups all verbal fluency pro-ductions –regardless of speaker intention— into one of three taxonomic groups (i.e. val-id answers, perseverations, and intrusions). The traditional lack of fine-grained annota-tion units is especially problematic when analyzing the qualitatively distinct fluency da-ta of older participants and may cause studies to miss the relation between lexical access capacity and age.