“Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?”, Matthias R. Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher and James W. Pennebaker, Science, vol. 317, no. 5834, 2007, p. 82
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1139940).
The authors, who are variously at the University of Arizona, at Washington University and at the University of Texas, report that:Women are generally assumed to be more talkative than men. Data were analyzed from 396 participants who wore a voice recorder that sampled ambient sounds for several days. Participants’ daily word use was extrapolated from the number of recorded words. Women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day.
(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research Review,” published in AIR 14:4.)