Dr. Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco states in ``The Female Brain" that ``A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000."
``The Female Brain" has made quite a splash since its publication last month, and this word-count claim is one of the most striking facts supporting her argument that the female brain is ``a lean, mean communicating machine." The 20,000 vs. 7,000 numbers have been cited in reviews all over the world, from The New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror.
The book's endnotes appear to attribute the numbers to a 1997 self-help book by Allan Pease and Allan Garner, ``Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure." But Pease himself has presented several different word count numbers in other sources.
In 2000, he published ``Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps" (with Barbara Pease), which attributes to women ``6,000-8,000 words," while men get ``just 2,000-4,000 words." (They also offer daily counts for women's and men's ``vocal sounds" and ``facial expressions, head movements, and other body language signals"-but don't provide a source for any of the counts.) In a 2004 CNN interview, Allan Pease said that ``women can speak 20,000 to 24,000 words a day versus a man's top end of 7,000 to 10,000."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/sex_on_the_brain/
