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Who do you think talks more, men or women? Why do you think so? Would you be surprised to hear that research from Texas and Arizona universities published in July's Science magazine showed that men and women use about the same number of words a day?

The study was conducted by using an electronic recorder that was carried around by the research subject. The recorder would turn on every 12 minutes and record 30 seconds of ambient noise. Later, the recordings were transcribed and the number of words were recorded. The least chatty was a man who spoke about 500 words a day, and the most talkative was another man who spoke 47,000 words a day.

This research directly refutes Louann Brizendine's claim from her 2006 book "The Female Brain." Her widely publicized contention was that women talk three times as much as men. A quick Google search reveals 23,000 Web hits quoting her research. Why were her results so enthusiastically swallowed? Why were there so many repetitions of cliches about women talking too much, attitudes that one might have assumed to be long out of fashion? And why did the new research spark a scramble to redefine what kind of speech is valuable now that research has shown that women and men aren't different in the amount of speech?

A PBS series, "Language Prejudice," points out that, counter to cultural myths about who talks the most, males tend to dominate discussion in classrooms. Dale Spender, an Australian linguistics researcher, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately favoring girls were surprised to find that despite their efforts, they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms.

Another study mentioned by the PBS series reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 percent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time, even though it was actually a 50-50 split.

While on the subject of talking, I'd like to take the opportunity to head off yet another stereotype -- women don't talk more on the phone, either. AT&T research shows that men talk more than women on cellphones, although women are catching up. According to a recent survey of approximately 1,000 users, men average 458 minutes of monthly wireless phone usage and women average 453 minutes.

It's interesting to see how people who read about the research try to break down what kind of talking is going on. The research shows that women don't talk more than men, so some people feel compelled to find other ways to make men's speech superior to women's. On news sites that allow users to comment on stories, I've see posts saying "women are just gossips, men talk about important things" or "the research was done on college students, once men get married they will be silenced by their wives talking."

Setting aside the obvious issues with women and marriage in the previous comment, it is true that college students make up a large percentage of subjects in many research projects -- students are plentiful and willing to participate in research projects for minimal remuneration. One would expect the researchers to replicate their research with nonstudents for a more accurate picture of generic human behavior.

Reading online responses to the new research reminded me of research I had conducted on online communication, back when I was still innocent enough to be surprised to find that women are often perceived as talking "too much" whenever they talk at all.

Susan Herring, author of "The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online," did some interesting research on who talks more online, perceptions of who talks more and differences in ways of talking. Herring found that men perceive women as talking more than men in situations where women are actually speaking less than one-third of the time. This phenomenon is not limited to academic seminars or to computer-based communication but was found to be a feature of mixed-sex conversation in general public settings.

In public contexts, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that women are getting more than their fair share. Spender explains this as follows: "The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women."

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.