July 09, 2007 (Monday) – The Comments from 100 Indians recently collected by International Reporter from men and women, analyze that women talk more than men, even though tJhere cannot be a set principle.

Talkative men speak more than reserved women and so the talkative women outshine the reserved men. This depends on the situation and the region and nationality where the person lives, irrespective of the gender one belongs to. To label who talks more may not be fair, as per International Reporter.

Louann Brizendine, founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco's Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain about a year ago. His claim was that women talk more than men, as per the claim the men talked about 7,000 words per day whereas women chat about 20,000 words an on average.
 
A new study published today in Science reports men and woman actually use roughly the same number of words daily.

James Pennebaker, chair of the University of Texas at Austin's psychology department, says he was skeptical of the lopsided stats when he saw them quoted in an interview with Brizendine in The New York Times Magazine.

 "I read that and I knew it couldn't be true simply because we've run too many studies," he says, "it just didn't make sense." In fact, he had been collecting data over the past decade with colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson that specifically showed that the sexes are about equal when it comes to a war of words.

After working with posttraumatic stress disorder patients for years, Pennebaker had noticed a deficiency in people's self-reporting of their experiences. So, he devised "a measure that would capture people's real life," he says.

His device, called EAR (for electronically activated recorder) is a digital recorder that subjects can store in a sheath similar to a case for glasses in their purses or pockets. The EAR samples 30 seconds of ambient noise (including conversations) every 12.5 minutes; carriers cannot tamper with recordings.

Researchers used this device to collect data on the chatter patterns of 396 university students (210 women and 186 men) at colleges in Texas, Arizona and Mexico. They estimated the total number of words that each volunteer spoke daily, assuming they were awake 17 of 24 hours.

In most of the samples, the average number of words spoken by men and women were about the same. Men showed a slightly wider variability in words uttered, and boasted both the most economical speaker (roughly 500 words daily) and the most verbose yapping at a whopping 47,000 words a day.

Full Story:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=9D97CA85-E7F2-99DF-374622AAD8C33548&chanID=sa007