Researchers outfitted 210 college students - 179 Americans and 31 Mexicans - with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person’s daily utterances. The researchers found that women speak a little more than 16,000 words a day. Men speak a little less than 16,000 words. The difference is not statistically significant. Psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona says the three top talkers in the study - uttering up to 47,000 words a day - were all men. So was the most taciturn subject, who spoke only 700 words a day, on average. Mehl says he and his colleagues were surprised at the outcome. They had tentatively bought into the popular stereotype that women are the more talkative sex. But they were skeptical of the widespread claim that women use three times more words a day then men. The claim got prominent attention with the publication of a 2006 book called The Female Brain. Its author, Louann Brizendine, has been widely quoted claiming that ‘a woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.’ Other sources have claimed an even […]