It is something one half of the population has long suspected and the other half always vocally denied– women really do talk more than men. In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day – 13,000 more than the average man.
Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat, and actually enjoy hearing their own voices, a new book suggests. The book – written by a female psychiatrist, Dr. Luan Brizendine – says that inherent (生来就有的) differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.
In The Female Mind, Brizendine says the differences can be traced back to the womb (子宫), where the sex hormone (激素) called testosterone moulds the developing male brain. The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all reduced before a baby boy is born.
The result is that boys – and men – chat less than their female peers and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent. "Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Brizendine.
There are, however, advantages of being the strong, silent type. Brizendine explains in her book that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing – allowing men to become "deaf" to the most logical arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.
Other scientists, however, say many of the differences between the male and female personality can be explained by social conditioning, with a child's upbringing greatly influencing their character.
Deborah Cameron, an Oxford University linguistics professor with a special interest in language and gender, said the amount we talk is influenced by who we are with and what we are doing. "If you look through a large number of studies you will find there is little difference between the amount men and women talk," she added.
