Valerie Pfeiffer & Matthias R. Mehl &
Our lives are lived day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. This fine-grained, equally spaced resolution of time means we do not always perceive changes in the small, everyday things around us, like the slow deterioration of the road we drive on every day. Sometimes we need to take a step back and examine them from a more distant perspective, for example, when unexpectedly hitting a newly formed pothole.
Such an “unexpected pothole” was recently afforded to us when analyzing several data sets jointly within the scope of a registered replication report (Tidwell et al., 2025). These data feature estimates of daily spoken words for 2,197 participants based on a careful analysis of passively sampled ambient audio recordings of their daily lives. The participants, ranging in age from 10 to 94, were part of 22 studies conducted over the span of 14 years and resided (mostly) in the United States as well as Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The report yielded an estimate for the average number of spoken words per day of 12,792, an estimate noticeably lower than what a prior study from 2007 yielded using
the same method (M = 15,959; Mehl et al., 2007). After
verifying that this was not a mathematical error, we decided to put the hypothesis that we had lost words over time to the test.
By relating the estimates of participants’ daily spoken words to the year their data were collected, we discovered that for each year between 2005 and 2019 an average of 338 fewer words were spoken per day, b =
-338, 95% credible interval (Crl) = (-652, – 25), as estimated using Bayesian multilevel modeling. At first glance, 300 or so words seems like a small, insignificant loss, as if it would not make much of a difference. And indeed, this finding ultimately was buried in a publication full of seemingly more interesting, larger, and more controversial findings.
But, as trivial as 338 words a day may feel, the loss of these daily spoken words unavoidably adds up. It means that pach vegr wo shok more than 120000