Nearly 400 college students were wired up with microphones that were used by the researchers to count the words they used in a day.

Women spoke a daily average of 16,215 words in a day compared with 15,669 words from men.

But researchers believe this difference is statistically insignificant.

"What's a 500-word difference, compared to the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative persons?", said lead researcher Matthias Mehl.

The study was sparked by a magazine article claming that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men.

But Mehl and his co-author James W. Pennebaker couldn't find any research supporting this claim, so they decided to redress this.

"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," said Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas.

The numbers of words that the men used in a day ranged from 47,000 words in one case to 500 over a few days in another.

The researchers do concede that their findings may not apply to everyone as they only studied university students.

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