SILENCE is golden, but it is not the preserve of men. It seems that verbosity may be governed by personality type, not gender.
James Pennebaker of the University of Texas and his colleagues developed a small device to record snippets of conversation among American and Mexican university students at regular intervals. They then used these recordings to estimate the number of words spoken each day.
The results showed that the stereotype of the strong, silent male is the exception rather than the rule. Far from being tight-lipped, males managed an average of around 16,000 words a day – the same…
