Press: Men talk just as much as women, study says - HC

Men talk just as much as women, study says - Houston Chronicle: "A University of Texas at Austin psychologist and his colleagues appear to have laid to rest the long-standing myth that women talk more than men. Their study of 400 male and female students in the United States and Mexico found that men and women both say about 16,000 words a day, or 17 words a minute, during waking hours. [...]

The source of [...] the 20,000/7,000 word split, dropped in subsequent editions after psychologists complained about the book's first printing, remains a more serious matter to some scholars. [...] His own inquiry found the earliest use of the figures by James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, who employed it as a 'guesstimate.'"

(As usual, Dobson pulls alarmist factoids out of his, um, hat and millions of unthinking followers take them as scientific fact.)