Women don't talk more than men. Really, they don't.

Really.

Popular wisdom would have it that women are much chattier than men, speaking 20,000 words a day, vs. the average man's 7,000.

But a study being published Friday debunks that stereotype. Both men and women use about 16,000 words a day, says the new research, in Science magazine.

"It's been a common belief, but it just didn't fit," says James Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the seven-year study.

Pennebaker and colleagues analyzed recorded conversations of 396 university students ages 18-29 in the US and Mexico, including 210 women and 186 men. The study didn't look at vocabulary or word use, but rather word count via an electronically activated recorder that researchers developed and refined during the study, conducted between 1998 and 2004.

He says two-thirds of participants spoke 11,000 to 25,000 words a day, with the average for both sexes about 16,000.

The finding may seem surprising in a popular culture where women are often stereotyped as talkative and men as uncommunicative.

Most recently, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine cited the 20,000 vs. 7,000 comparison in her 2006 book The Female Brain, as evidence for gender brain differences. After the book came out in August, the statistic was widely quoted.

"That hit a nerve. It's been surprising to me that this one little point is the point people pick out," says Brizendine, director of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco.

But experts in neurolinguistics contacted her saying the data was unsubstantiated. The statistic has been cut from newer editions

"That first printing is a collector's item now," she says.

Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says that after Brizendine's book came out, he tried to track down evidence to support her claim, but failed. He posted about it online.

Liberman, who was not involved in Pennebaker's research, says the new research is significant because previous studies have focused on telephone conversations or interview transcripts, rather than recording people's conversations in the course of their daily lives.

"This is the first large-scale study in which the amount of talk was tracked," he says.

For the new research, study participants spent an average 17 waking hours wearing a lapel microphone attached to a cord linking it to the recording device, generally hidden underneath their clothes.

Initial data collection used a tape recorder, then as technology progressed, a digital recorder, and finally a pocket PC no bigger than a cell phone. Participants typically wore the recorders for designated periods that lasted anywhere from two to 10 days. The recorder was programmed to record for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, so users didn't know when it was on or off and they could not control it.

Liberman says the research clearly disproves the social stereotype.

"Some men are more talkative than others," he says. "And some women are more talkative than others."