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I wonder if some of this confusion has to do with the way you count words; do you count duplicates or don't you? One of the studies cited found that men and wo
by araneae 17y ago
I wonder if some of this confusion has to do with the way you count words; do you count duplicates or don't you?
One of the studies cited found that men and women talk about the same amount (it was a review, and some of the papers in review found that men talked more.)
However, it's fairly established that women tend to have bigger vocabularies than men; they do better on the verbal portions of the SATs and GREs, for instance.
It's possible that men talk the same amount but are more likely to duplicate words and therefore use fewer words in a day.
- gjm11 17y agoNo, none of this (so far as I can tell) has anything to do with the number of different words spoken in a day by either men or women. What it's about is simply the fact that some popular science authors and journalists are throwing about totally bogus claims about sex differences, and falsely claiming that they are supported by scientific research.
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- electromagnetic 17y agoI'm sorry, of the articles I've managed to read making this bogus claim most attribute it to women's nature to chit-chat and gossip. However I highly doubt women would manage a larger vocabulary by consistently repeating themselves. The articles themselves are frequently hypocritical, offering one bogus claim to back up another despite them being contradictory when looked at closely.
- sabat 17y ago* it's fairly established that women tend to have bigger vocabularies than men; they do better on the verbal portions of the SATs and GREs, for instance.* The only true generalization is that there are no true generalizations. Example: I'm a male. My SAT score breakdown (taken in the 1980s): math 610, language 680. My four-year-old son recently took an IQ test and his language score was 145. Maybe we're not typical, but I'm not even sure the idea that most women have larger vocabularies than most men works. Why are so many of the world's greatest writers and speakers men?
- byrneseyeview 17y agoI think the point of "it's fairly well-established" is that there have been studies. And that is definitely consistent with reality: are their more female novelists, poets, or cryptographers? Your sample size of one is interesting, but not enough. (I, too, am a guy who did better on the verbal portion of the SAT.)
- araneae 17y agoPoint 1: It's perfectly possible for the average woman to do better than the average male on the verbal portion of the SAT and for the average male to do better on his verbal portion of the SAT than on his math score. Not that that's true. Point 2: When will you guys stop clinging to anecdotal evidence? Just because most computer scientists are male doesn't mean that there are no female computer scientists, which is a claim analogous to the one you made.