Stereotypes tell us that women are the chattier sex, prone to detailed verbal accounts of emotions and events while men brood silently in front of the television.

Now, a scientific study refutes that, finding that the daily amount of words used by men and women is virtually the same.

The results, to be published today in the journal Science, also contradict an oft-cited figure: that women use nearly three times as many words as men, or 20,000 words a day for women versus 7,000 for men.

To measure the amount of words spoken by men and women, researchers outfitted college students from the United States and Mexico with portable digital recorders from two to 10 days. Taping 30-second snippets every 12 1/2 minutes, the recorders allowed for unbiased monitoring of normal daily conversations, as opposed to the more artificial or limited settings of previous studies.

When the information from 210 women and 186 men was compiled, both groups were found to use, on average, roughly 16,000 words a day during an average of 17 waking hours.

The exact score: women 16,215; men 15,669.

The difference of 546 words is not statistically significant, according to the researchers.

"What's a 500-word difference, compared with the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative persons" in the study, said Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, who led the team that came up with the finding.

"Men talk about technology, sports and money. They use more numbers," Mehl said. "Women talk about fashion, but also about relationships."

The new study debunks the extreme difference between men and women previously cited, often as scientific fact.

"If there had been that big of a difference, I would have seen it," said James W. Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin and one of the study's authors. "So it occurred to me to look at the data and see if that was really true.

"Sure enough, there was just nothing there.

"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time."

What was striking, Mehl, said was the great range of word use. The most was 47,000 words in a day, the least was 700.

"Any group difference just disappears against the background of individual difference," he said.

One linguist not part of the study believes the word-count difference began as an educated guess. "My current belief is that (the figure) started as someone's idea of a plausible estimate and was turned into a false scientific fact-oid by writers who like to misuse the authority of science," said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

The research was limited to college students, but Pennebaker said he believes it would probably apply to others in the same age range.

"The question is, how it applies to people as we get older," he said yesterday.

Mehl said he thinks it should apply across age groups, but he wondered how it would be affected by different cultures.

A second analysis, which looked at 63 studies of gender differences in talkativeness, found that men actually talked slightly more than women. This was especially true when they were observed interacting with spouses or strangers, and when the topic of conversation was non-personal in nature.

"The magnitude of the difference (between men and women) was negligible," said Campbell Leaper, a psychologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz. But he added that "the overall pattern suggests that some men may be using talkativeness to dominate the conversation."

Leaper's study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service, The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this report.