In 2007 a study published on Science had refuted the classic stereotype of the chattering woman, discovering that males and females pronounce approximately the same number of daily words – 16,000. Now a wider study published on Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and coordinated by the same psychologist, Matthias Mehl, offers a somewhat different vision of the matter: the women would actually speak more than men, but only during the central 40 years of their life.
3,000 more words. The data analyzed in the previous 2007 study were quite limited, as they concerned only 500 participants, almost all college students who lived in Austin, Texas. This time Mehl and colleagues analyzed 630,000 audio recordings obtained from 22 studies conducted from 2005 to 2018 in four different countries, with almost 2,200 participants from 10 to 94 years of age. The results highlighted that the women between 25 and 64 years old pronounce 3,000 more words per day on average Compared to their peers men – 21,845 against 18,570; For the other age groups, however, no significant differences have been detected.
Care of children. The reason for this discrepancy between the sexes is not certain, but the authors hypothesize that it could be because women often they talk more with children During their growth – which normally takes place in the “verbose” female age group detected by the study. “If the main cause were biological factors, for example hormonal, the difference between the sexes should also be evident between teenagers”, explains Mehl, which underlines how the same is worth for generational differences, which should – if decisive – be visible in the data of the older participants.
Let’s talk (all) less. A last aspect that emerges from the research is that Over the years, both men and women have reduced the number of daily words pronounced – which went from 16,000 to 13,000. To understand the reason for this progressive tendency to taciturnity, further studies are needed, but Mehl hypothesizes that much of the fault (or of the merit?) Is attributable to the increase in the use of social media and messaging apps.
