It’s long been believed that women are the chattier sex.
Now, a new study finally reveals the truth.
Researchers at the University of Arizona recorded more than 2,000 people to find out if men or women are more more talkative.
Overall, men spoke on average 11,950 words per day – but women surpassed this with an average of 13,349 words per day.
However, the difference between the sexes is smaller than previously assumed, according to the team.
Despite the findings, the experts say the assumption that women talk more than men is a ‘stereotype’ that carries often negative connotations.
‘Women are widely assumed to be more talkative than men,’ say the experts in their paper, published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
‘The ubiquity and often negative connotation of this stereotype makes evaluating its accuracy particularly important.’
The study reveals that women talk more words than men per day on average – but the team say the gap is smaller than expected (file photo)
For the study, a total of 2,197 participants wore a device that intermittently recorded short snippets of sound throughout their waking hours.
After collecting more than 600,000 recordings, transcribers counted the number of words spoken by each participant.
This data was then processed to estimate the total number of words spoken per day.
Overall, the study confirmed that women spoke slightly more words per day than men, but the difference was small – 1,073 words on average.
However, the researchers found there were large individual differences in talkativeness, which adds ‘statistical uncertainty’ to the findings.
In other words, there’s not enough of a gap to be able to say whether this observed difference between the sexes was meaningful or reliable.
The least talkative participant spoke fewer than 100 words per day, while the most talkative spoke more than an incredible 120,000 words per day.
If we consider the average waking day as 16 hours, that’s approximately 7,500 words per hour, or 125 words per minute.
A 2007 study showed that men and women don’t differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day each. But concerns were raised that the study’s sample consisted was too small and consisted only of college students (file photo)
According to a 2007 study, men and women don’t differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day each.
But concerns were raised that the study’s sample consisted was too small and consisted only of college students.
This new study gives a clearer picture, but researchers suggest follow-up studies into sex-based differences may be needed.
‘The study leaves open some questions around whether the two genders differ in a practically meaningful way in how many words they speak on a daily basis,’ they conclude.
‘The notion that women and men differ in their daily lexical budget has been around, largely empirically untested, for quite a long time, and it has become a pervasive fixture in gender difference arguments.’
Nearly two decades ago, American neuropsychiatrist and clinician Dr Louann Brizendine said inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.
In her book ‘The Female Brain’, Dr Brizendine said women devote more brain cells to talking than men, which is linked to sex hormone testosterone affecting the developing male brain.
Dr Brizendine also claimed women say about 20,000 words a day and men say about 7,000 – but it later emerged these figures were taken from a self-help book with no academic citation.
