Matthias Mehl, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, replicated his earlier study on daily word counts with data from over two thousand people and found that men and women speak equally. The replication study, involving audio recorded between 2005 and 2019, concluded men and women were equally talkative.

A paper detailing a decline in daily words was published earlier this year. Participants in the replication study spoke an estimated 12,700 words per day, a 20% decrease from the 16,000 words estimated in the earlier study two decades ago. Mehl noted that the number of words spoken daily appeared to decline by approximately 338 words each year, a reduction that translates into around 120,000 words annually.

"We thought we must have made a mistake," Mehl said. He observed that the decline in daily words was more pronounced for individuals under the age of twenty-five, who experienced an average loss of 451 daily words per year. "This is many, many minutes of conversations," he said. Mehl also stated that people no longer ask for directions and use self-checkout lines at grocery stores instead of interacting with neighbors.

Valeria Pfeifer, a co-author of the paper, speculated that digital communication may have supplanted spoken words. Joshua Smyth, a health psychologist at Ohio State University who was not involved in the study, said, "Maybe I don't have to talk to people about trivial matters anymore, and I'm judiciously pruning my communications to be focussed on those things that are more important."

Mehl co-created the electronically activated recorder (EAR) in the 1990s to assess who people spoke to, how frequently, and the type of language used. "We basically get an unobtrusive record of a person's day as it naturally unfolds," Mehl said. The EAR, which began as a modified microcassette recorder that required participants to flip tapes, now operates as a smartphone application, passively documenting sounds as long as individuals carry their phones.

The earlier study on daily word counts found no evidence that women spoke more words per day than men. That study estimated both men and women spoke 16,000 words a day on a typical day. This contrasted with the assertion in the book "The Female Brain," which claimed women spoke roughly 20,000 words daily while men uttered only 7,000.