CHICAGO, July 5: When it comes to yakking, men and women are equal opportunity offenders, according to a study published on Thursday that challenges the notion that women like to gab more than men.

US researchers who tracked the conversational habits of almost 400 US and Mexican students in real time, discovered that both sexes run their mouths at a remarkably similar rate over the course of a day, even if they tend to talk about different subjects.The findings challenge the pop culture stereotypes of the female chatterbox and the reticent male celebrated in book, song and celluloid including country singer Toby Keith's hit song “I wanna talk about me,” in which he pleads with his girlfriend to shut up for a minute so he can get a word in.

“We talk about your skin and the dimples on your chin/The polish on your toes and the run in your hose/But every once in a while/I wanna talk about me,” he says plaintively.“The widespread and highly publicised stereotype about female talkativeness and male reticence is unfounded,” said Mathias Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper.

The notion of the female chatterbox is a longstanding one, but the idea got some additional scientific validation in 2006 with the release of a book entitled “The Female Brain” by Louann Brizendine, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

In it, Brizendine talked about the gender gap in conversation, asserting that women use 20,000 words a day to a man's 7,000. Some academics questioned those statistics, but the idea that women get through almost three times as many words as men in a day got a lot of media attention, and caught the eye of Mehl.

In an effort to sort fact from fiction, or at least fact from urban myth, Mehl and a group of psychologists from the University of Texas at Austin examined the systematic recordings of the real-world conversations of several hundred college students from the United States and Mexico.

The participants wore electronically activated portable recorders that recorded the audio in an unobtrusive fashion. The researchers analysed the audio and calculated how many words each participant spoke in total in a 17-hour period.

The results showed that while the women got through an average of 16,215 words, the men were no slouches, with a daily average of 15,669 - a wash in statistical terms.

—AFP