Ratae wrote:
Apparently, the average woman says 6000 words a day compared to men's 2000. I don't really know any female loners. I know they must exist but they seem very rare?
that's a myth. men and women talk about the same amount every day, but on average they talk more than each other in certain contexts.
Quote:
Mark Liberman, professor of phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, has turned the demolition of the women-talk-threetimes-as-much-as-men fact into a personal crusade. The 20,000 v 7,000 numbers that appear on the book jacket, he says, "have been cited in reviews all over the world, from the New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror". They are rapidly hardening into fact, but where do they come from?
Brizendine's book runs to 280 pages, of which almost a third are notes. Liberman was sure he would find "a reliable source for this statistic" among this battery of supporting data. Instead, according to a piece he wrote in the Boston Globe, all he found was an apparent attribution to a self-help book - Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure by Allan Pease and Alan Garner. He was not impressed.
In the end, he concluded that the figures were probably based on guesswork, likening the "fact" that women talk more than men to the often stated "fact" that the Inuit have 17 words for snow. Both, he said, were myths. The Inuit actually have only one word for snow; and research shows only minute differences between the amount that men and women talk. "Whatever the average female v male difference turns out to be," he concluded, "it will be small compared to the variation among women and among men; and there will also be big differences, for any given individual, from one social setting to another."
...
"Women speak a lot more in areas of social comfort," she says. In other words, in the home and in domestic relationships, it is women who will do most of the talking. Coronation Street's scriptwriters are spot on. Men will hold forth in other forums. She says it is always male students who ask the first questions at her lectures, and says that men will talk so much during courtship that women will barely get a word in.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... ationships
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