Women Talk More Than Men by Abby Kaplan

Women Talk More than Men and other Myths about Language Explained by Abby Kaplan is, like its title says, all about language. The book looks at commonly held ideas, like "Chimpanzees have the language capabilities of a 2 year old", "French is the most beautiful language" and of course "Women talk more than men" and uses past studies to see if they are true.

To be honest, I requested this book from NetGalley because the cover gave me the impression that this would be aimed at a general audience. You know, one of those easy to read 'pop science' kind of books.

But this was not the case. This is more or less a textbook, with exercises you can do after reading, and an emphasis on the various studies carry out. Oh, and an extensive reference list after each chapter.

Thankfully, it's still readable. Much more readable than Taste as Experience, which was another book that I thought was aimed at the general public, not an academic audience. I had very few problems following the author's arguments, and the bullet point summaries at the end of each chapter definitely help.

At the end of the book, the author includes a brief overview to statistics, including an explanation on descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. So if stats isn't your strong point, you may want to read the appendix first, so that all the results of the studies make sense. But generally, if you know what "p" and "statistically significant" and the like mean, you shouldn't have any problems digesting the results of the various studies my

Overall, I'd recommend this book to people who are interested in language. It's not the most accessible of texts, but it's definitely not an "academics only" sort of book.

Disclaimer: A copy of this book was provided for free by the via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.