What Scientists Learned by Eavesdropping on Thousands of People

Matthias Mehl, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, who helped conduct the study, recently set out to replicate his findings with a larger data set: audio from more than two thousand people between the ages of ten and ninety-four, recorded between 2005 and 2019. Once again, Mehl concluded that men and women were equally talkative. But, strangely, when he and a co-author further analyzed the results, they found that participants had spoken an estimated twelve thousand seven hundred words a day—twenty per cent less than in the earlier study. “We thought we must have made a mistake,” Mehl said. Each year, he went on, the number of words spoken daily seemed to decline by about three hundred and thirty-eight. That translates into around a hundred and twenty thousand words a year—about the length of “Sense and Sensibility.” And Mehl noticed that the decline was even steeper for people under twenty-five, who lost an average of four hundred and fifty-one daily words a year. “This is many, many minutes of conversations,” Mehl told me.

A paper about the lost words, published earlier this year, has inspired intriguing theories. 

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