Results from a new study by US researchers published in the journal Science found that both men and woman average around 16 000 words a day.

James Pennebaker of the University of Texas in Austin and Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl decided to look into the traditional belief that woman natter on much more than men.

They equipped 396 college students, around half were women, for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours.
“All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count. Pennebaker says the findings, appearing in today’s issue of Science, should put the myths to rest: Both men and women averaged roughly 16,000 words a day. And there was no appreciable international difference either, at least in North America. U.S. students had about the same average as a sample of 51 students in Mexico,” the Science report points out.

“At this point, the only remaining scientific question appears to be why so many intelligent and well-educated people have so easily–even eagerly–accepted and spread what appear to be fabricated numbers supporting a false generalization,” says linguistics professor Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research.