We've all been led to believe that women love nothing more than to gab all day, while men are more likely to keep silent. But new research challenges the notion.

Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at The University of Arizona, set out to debunk the growing "urban legend" that a woman uses about three times as many words in a day as a man.

He particularly wanted to challenge the findings in the bestselling book "The Female Brain" by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine that contends that women use 20,000 words a day, while a man uses only about 7,000.

Mehl and the others recorded the conversations of nearly 400 U.S. and Mexican male and female university students who were between the ages of 19 and 25 years old in a series of studies conducted over six years.

To catch all of this chit-chat, they developed an electronically-activated recorder that digitally logged the daily conversations of those who wore the device. The participants could not control the recording device, which automatically recorded for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, and did not know when the device was on.

The results:

• Women in the study spoke a daily average of 16,215 words
• Men spoke an average of 15,669 words

So true, the women win, but not by a statistically significant margin. Mehl also noted that there are "very large individual differences around this mean."

Among the three most talkative males in the study, one used 47,000 words. The least talkative male spoke just a little more than 500," Mehl said.

The research is reported in the July 6 issue of the journal Science.

Mehl admits that he studied only college students, but says the study showed no support for the idea that women have larger "lexical budgets" than men, any more than it did that vocabulary gender differences have a basis in evolution.

But the last word, at least from this study, is that "the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness and male reticence is unfounded."