WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - There is a common belief in the society that women speak more than men. Based on this assumption, the researchers from the University of Arizona, also known as U of A, conducted a study to explore the truth.
'There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men,' said Colin Tidwell, co-lead study author and a clinical psychology doctoral candidate. 'We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.'
The study was initially conducted by U of A psychologist Matthias Mehl in 2007, involving 500 participants, who wore a device called the electronically activated recorder or EAR to randomly record snippets of their day-to-day conversations.
The findings showed that men and women speak about 16,000 words per day. However, the study was conducted on a population consisting of college-aged students living in Austin, Texas.
Inspired by the previous study, the recent study analyzed 630,000 EAR recordings from 22 different studies across four countries. The sample comprised of 2,197 participants aged between 10 to 94.
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the new study found that women between the ages of 25 and 65 spoke around 21,845 words daily, while men in the same age group spoke about 18,570, reflecting a difference of 3,000 words between the two groups.
'Gender-linked differences in child rearing and family care are one possibility that could account for this difference,' said Mehl, senior author of the study, explained the difference in words.
However, the same difference was not observed among groups consisting of younger people aged 10 to 24, or older adults aged 65 and above.
The researchers also found that people in general have started speaking less than before due to the increasing use of digital communication such as texting and online messaging.
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