Nearly two decades ago, scholars from the University of Arizona conducted a study that found men and women speak about the same number of words per day (16,000). Recently, a new team of researchers from the University of Arizona has conducted a similar study with a much larger sample size, and found the average number of daily words spoken changes throughout the lifespan, with some gender differences emerging in early and middle adulthood.
The initial study in 2007 analyzed a sample of 500 men and women who wore an Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) that recorded random intervals of daily conversations. However, the study’s particpants were almost all college-aged adults who lived in Austin, Texas. In their most recent study, scholars from the University of Arizona analyzed more than 630,000 EAR recordings from nearly two dozen different studies conducted in four countries, consisting of some 2,200 participants aged 10 to 94.
The new study found a gender difference in average daily words spoken among participants aged 25 to 64, with women in this age group averaging 21,845 words per day, compared to men’s average of 18,570. This was the only age group that had a gender difference in daily spoken words. Men and women under 18, between the ages of 18 and 24, and age 65 and over all spoke roughly the same number of words per day. However, daily speech does vary greatly on an individual basis. Interestingly, the study’s least and most talkative participants were both men.
While the researchers cannot determine why middle-aged women speak more than their male counterparts, they theorize it could be because this age group is associated with child-rearing. As women are historically more involved in family care, they could be speaking more to their children than men.
Furthermore, the authors found that the overall number of words spoken for all participants has decreased over the past two decades. In 2005, the average number of words spoken was around 16,000. In 2018, that average dropped to around 13,000. They theorize this could be due to increases in digital communication, such as texting and social media.