Do Early Risers Have Greater Verbal Skills Than Night Owls?

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Some writers like to burn the midnight oil and believe they experience more verbal fluency in the evening; others are early risers who seem to have greater verbal abilities in the morning.

On both ends of the chronotype spectrum, writers who are "morning larks" or "night owls" may have better focus and attention because there are fewer distractions in the wee hours of the morning. Whether staying up late or getting up in the predawn hours, extreme chronotypes' verbal skills may benefit from the peace and quiet of working when most of the world is sleeping.

Interestingly, previous research using Horne & Östberg's Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ)—which identifies if someone is a definite morning type, definite evening type, or intermediate chronotype—suggests that, overall, evening types tend to have superior verbal abilities.

However, previous research on morningness vs. eveningness and verbal abilities didn't take age into account. Accumulating evidence suggests that chronotype and circadian rhythm affect cognition differently as we get older.

Early Birds Have Very High MEQ Scores (70-86)

The MEQ rates morningness vs. eveningness tendencies on a scale from 16-86, with higher scores implying that someone is more of a morning person. Here's how MEQ scores are categorized on a continuum:

• Definite morning type (70–86)
• Moderate morning type (59–69)
• Intermediate morning/evening type (42–58)
• Moderate evening type (31–41)
• Definite evening type (16–30)

As mentioned, empirical evidence suggests that, in general, evening types with lower MEQ scores tend to have superior verbal abilities. That said, these evidence-based findings beg the question: If night owls have better verbal skills, why do anecdotal accounts of established writers' daily routines by mid-life suggest that most successful novelists are early risers?

In an article about the daily routines of famous writers, James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) observes that "excellent writers start writing in the morning." For example, in a 1968 Paris Review interview for the literary magazine's "Art of Fiction" series, Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton, "When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible."

Maya Angelou is another example of a morning lark with extraordinary verbal abilities. She was notorious for getting up really early and starting her writing day at 6:30 in the morning. Kurt Vonnegut was also an early riser who did most of his writing from 5:30-10:00 a.m.

In a "How I Write" interview, Barbara Kingsolver said, "I tend to wake up very early. Too early. Four o'clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file."

What's the Link Between Early Birds' Morningness and Verbal Abilities?

A new study (Gibbings et al., 2022) on how morning vs. evening chronotype relates to human intelligence gives us fresh clues as to why so many literary greats develop a habitual daily routine that includes writing first thing in the morning. This study was led by Stuart Fogel, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the University of Ottawa's Sleep Research Laboratory. Their findings were recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Research in Behavioral Sciences.

In response to previous research showing that people with an eveningness orientation (night owls) tend to have superior verbal intelligence in comparison to their early-to-bed-early-to-rise counterparts, Fogel said in a November 2022 news release, "Once you account for key factors including bedtime and age, we found the opposite to be true, morning types tend to have superior verbal ability."

Fogel's team was surprised by this outcome. He notes that the link between someone's chronotype and verbal abilities is complicated and said, "Establishing the strength of a person's rhythm, which drives intelligence, is key to understanding the results of this nuanced study." He also notes that "our brain really craves regularity." Further, he notes, sticking to a consistent daily schedule and habit formation that stabilizes sleep/wake cycles is the best way to "optimize our own [circadian] rhythms."

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Strong Circadian Synchronization Boosts Verbal Skills

The latest (2022) morningness-eveningness study found that people of a younger age with later bedtimes tend to have superior verbal abilities. However, after adolescence and as people get older, higher MEQ scores and being more of a "morning type" was associated with better verbal skills.

Notably, because school-aged children tend to have better academic skills later in the day, the researchers posit that forcing kids to do verbally demanding tasks early in the day could result in subpar performance. "A lot of school start times are not determined by our chronotypes but by parents and work schedules, so school-aged kids pay the price of that because they are evening types forced to work on a morning type schedule," Fogel said.

The authors note that as people get older, morning chronotypes tend to develop a consistent daily routine that leads to higher "inter-daily stability" and strengthens circadian synchronization. They speculate that the combination of inter-daily stability and strong circadian synchronization boosts verbal skills, which gives early bird adults an advantage over age-matched night owls.

"[Our] findings show that people with earlier, morningness chronotypes have higher inter-daily stability. That is, morning types show stronger day-to-day synchronization of their sleep/wake cycle than evening types," the authors conclude. "Once differences in age and bedtime are controlled for, higher verbal ability is associated with morningness (rather than eveningness)."