Talking beauties 

It has been claimed that women speak about 20,000 words a day -
13,000 more than the average man - and scientists say a higher
amount of the Foxp2 protein is the reason women are more chatty

It's official:Women really do talk more 

than men 

• Researchers have found women have 
• higher levels of Foxp2 protein
• Team from University of Maryland found 
• male rats - the chattier gender in rodents - 
• make more of the protein than female 
• Previously been claimed that woman 
• speak 20,000 words a day 
• Girls learn to speak earlier and more 
• quickly than boys

Ladies, the next time the man in your life complains
 you talk too much, silence him with science.

Tell him - at length, of course - it is all because 
of the Foxp2 protein.

It has been claimed previously that women speak
 about 20,000 words a day - some 13,000 more
 than the average man.

But now scientists have found the key to explaining 
why women are the more talkative sex.

A study suggests that higher levels of the protein 
are found in the female brain.

US researchers found that those with more Foxp2,
 known as the ‘language protein’, in their brains were
 the chattier. Among humans that was women, 
but in rats it was the males.

The researchers set out to determine what might make 
male rats more vocal than their female cage mates. 
They separated four-day-old pups from their mothers
 and counted the number of times they cried out.

Both male and female pups emitted hundreds of cries, 
but the males called out twice as often. As a result, 
when the pups were put back in the same cage as 
their mother, she fussed over her sons first.

Researchers found the so-called 'language protein' that makes
 women more talkative also causes male rats to be more vocal
 than their female cage mates

The researchers then ramped up its production
 in the brains of female pups and reduced
 it in males. This led to the female rats crying
 out more often and their mothers showing
 more interest to them.

Tests on the parts of the brain known to be involved 
in vocal calls showed the male pups to have up to
 twice as much Foxp2 protein as the females.

The males in contrast, became less ‘talkative’, the
 Journal of Neuroscience reports. Next, the University 
of Maryland researchers tested samples from ten boys
 and girls aged between three and five.

This showed the girls to have 30 per cent more of
 the Foxp2 protein than the boys, in a brain area key 
to language in humans.

Researcher Margaret McCarthy said: ‘Based on 
our observations, we postulate higher levels of Foxp2
 in girls and higher levels of Foxp2 in male rats is an
 indication that Foxp2 protein levels are associated 
with the more communicative sex.’

Studies have shown that the female love of chit-chat 
begins at a young age. Girls learn to speak earlier
 and more quickly than boys. They produce their first 
words and sentences earlier, have larger vocabularies 
and use a greater variety of sentence types than
 boys of the same age.

However, Simon Fisher, one of the Oxford team

 who first pinpointed the protein, cautioned against 

drawing big conclusions from a study of such

 a small number of children.

(The Mail, UK)