Private Ear

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007--

Despite what you may have heard, women do not talk more than men, according to a paper published in the journal Science. An analysis of over 400 college students from the U.S. and Mexico suggests that women speak an average of 16,215 words over the course of the day; while men speak 15,669 words. The difference was not statistically significant, according the study.

Although the sexes speak about the same number of words per day, between individuals, daily utterance ranges enormously. “To me this is the real news, the really striking finding. The person who talked the most talked a full-blown 47,000 words, and he happens to be a male. And the person who talked the least, who is also a male, was a little below six hundred words,” says Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, in Tucson and one of the authors of the study.
Listen to a talkative man from study:
(credit: M. Mehl)

Extreme verbosity may have more to do with context than anything else though, Mehl says: “This person who talked 47,000 words—and this is just guessing—may have had to give a talk somewhere." The point is that the difference in chattiness between males and females is far less than the differences seen from person to person. Mehl says: “What is five hundred words compared to a range of 45,000 words?”

To track the subjects’ speech, Mehl and his colleagues, including James Pennebaker, chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin, developed a machine—an electronically activated recorder (called EAR)—that records thirty seconds of whatever sound is present every twelve and a half minutes. The participants did not know the recording schedule. The researchers hope that because the subjects did not know when they were being recorded, the recordings will provide an accurate picture of the way people talk. "We're trying to get people in their real lives; we're trying to get inside their heads," Pennebaker, a co-author on the study, explains.

Volunteers then transcribed the audio snippets. (“If only it could automatically be transcribed,” Pennebaker laments.) The transcribers not only take down everything the subject says, but also record what they hear in the background. They record whom the subject is talking to, whether a television is on, or if other sounds are present.

The transcribers, who do not know the identity of the subjects they are transcribing, “really get to know the people they are transcribing in this close, intimate way,” Pennebaker says. “Many of them will come away afterwards saying, ‘I really like that person, I’d love to meet that person sometime.’ And occasionally they’ll come away saying, ‘That’s a really despicable human being.’”

The researchers are using these transcripts to understand not only how much people talk, but what they talk about. Though men and women don't differ much in the amount of verbiage used, the researchers say differences exist in the way that men and women speak. “Yeah, we do find sex differences and they happen to map fairly well on the gender expectations,” says Mehl.

“Women use more pronouns, words like, ‘I’ ‘he’ ‘she’ ‘they,’ which suggests that women are paying more attention to and talking more about other human beings," Pennebaker says. "Men use more nouns, more articles like ‘a’ and ‘the,’ suggesting that they are talking about concrete objects. So whereas women are talking about other people, guys are talking about carburetors and tools, about objects and things."

Mehl stresses that the differences in noun and preposition use among males and females are still relatively small compared to the differences observed among individuals. But why do these differences matter at all? "Talking, I think it’s fair to say, is the behavior that people do the most. Our own research shows that we do it about 30 percent of the time,” Mehl says. “What other behavior are we engaging in that often? It’s what makes us human.”

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--Flora Lichtman