American boys and girls gossip the same amount - but they do it for different reasons and talk about slightly different thing, a University of Michigan study found.
If found that pre-teens gossip an average of 18 times an hour, devoting as much as 50 percent of their time to it.
The study did find some differences between boy talk and girl talk.
Girls aged 9 to 12 were more likely to talk about boys they had crushes on or boys other girl liked, said psychologist Jeffrey Parker. Boys rarely talked about the specific girls they liked, although they still talked about girls in general terms.
The study defined gossip as any "evaluative talk" about a person who was not in the room.