Source: The Conversation – France – By Frédéric Bernard, Maître de conférences en neuropsychologie, Université de Strasbourg
Whether it’s documents in textbooks or fiction studied in literature classes, reading print remains a pillar in learning. But the audiobook craze opens up new possibilities.
Could listening to literary works become part of the curriculum as opposed to reading them? Is reading comprehension the same for listening to a text as it is for reading a book?’
Reading vs listening: seemingly limited differences
A meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research and taking into account the results of 46 studies conducted between 1955 and 2020, including a total of 4,687 child and adult participants, Virginia Clinton-Lisell, university lecturer and researcher in Educational Psychology at the University of North Dakota, found that levels of understanding do not differ significantly when the same texts are read or listened to.
This result can be compared to a study by Madison Berl and her colleagues, published in 2010 in the journal Brain and Language, showing that children aged 7 to 12 years activate common brain regions when listening to and reading stories.
These regions notably include a frontotemporal network involved in semantic and syntactic processing shared between the two exploration modalities, which the authors describe as the “comprehension cortex.”
A comparable network, to which the parietal region was added, was also activated among adults who listened to or read the same story in the study by Fatma Deniz et al., published in 2019 in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Reading allows you to go at your own pace
However, the Clinton-Lisell meta-analysis also highlights that understanding is more improved in reading than in listening when participants can read at their own pace. Reading indeed offers the possibility to freely adjust your reading speed: slowing down when encountering a difficulty, going back or checking information. This cognitive control is not an option when listening to a text whose rhythm is predetermined, without the possibility of naturally backtracking.
Reading proves especially more effective than listening when evaluating general and inferential comprehension, which is not the case for literal comprehension.
Listening comes with an imposed rhythm and auditory structure, which makes it more difficult to implement comprehension strategies and generate inferences (conclusions based on evidence and reasoning) – or links between the ideas derived from the text and our personal knowledge and memories.
Reading, on the contrary, offers greater freedom around mental organisation and promotes interpretative creativity, supported by processes for regulating attention and cognitive control.
When it comes to getting students to develop deeper thinking, reading remains the most effective modality. It stimulates the creation of inferences, essential for establishing the coherence of a text – which guarantees fine and deep understanding.
Listening and its emotional dimension
However, listening to a text has certain advantages, particularly in terms of the experience it offers.
It involves perception of voices, intonations and prosodies which, for people who are sensitive to them, adds a more direct affective and emotional dimension than silent reading. It can make texts more easily accessible to students with reading difficulties, reducing visual load and supporting continuity of attention.
However, listening also demands auditory attention, which is in itself a specific skill, mobilising both working memory and sustained attention. The task requires the listener to maintain sustained vigilance when facing a continuous verbal flow, which can represent a challenge for some students, especially those with difficulties in concentration or auditory processing. In this respect, listening promotes auditory immersion that generally improves the overall understanding of the narrative, even if it does not always offer the same degree of control for getting to grips with the details of the text.
A voice recording can strengthen the listener’s engagement and enrich the reception of a narrative text by accentuating the presence of the characters and the pace of how the story unfolds. Reading, on the other hand, allows for a form of inner dialogue and suspends time, which is conducive to reflection.
In Lire le monde, anthropologist Michèle Petit very subtly describes the power of the reading experience at any age. In the chapter entitled “What is the purpose of reading?” she evokes several of its virtues, including how reading allows us to withdraw from the chaos, to open ourselves up to other worlds and to self-construct. The section “Lifting your eyes away from your book” illustrates this singular experience particularly well: reading a text allows us to conjure up a thought, an image or a memory – whereas listening, which is comparatively more linear, favours less.
Forming a virtuous cognitive assemblage
In several of her books – the most recent being Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (2025), Professor of Literature Katherine Hayles puts forward the concept of “cognitive assembly” to denote hybrid systems in which humans interact with technologies that extend their mental abilities. While this framework primarily pertains to the relationship between humans and computers, it can be expanded to include how we become one with reading and listening material.
Reading a text or listening to it fall under distinct forms of cognitive assemblies; each one taps differently into our senses, attention, memory and emotions. Learning to recognise these differences – and choosing the most suitable option for different purposes (in-depth reading or immersive listening) and our preferences (for visual and tactile, even olfactory, or auditory pursuits) – amounts to forming a virtuous cognitive assembly, capable of leveraging the richness of each mode of interaction with language and culture.
For schools, the challenge is not whether to choose between reading and listening, but to teach students to recognise the inherent value of each learning mode and think about how to combine the two.
Awareness of the different modes of exploring a text is part of differentiated instruction that is attentive to specific learning styles. It paves the way for fostering metacognition in education: observing each individual’s own way of learning, adjusting pace, and choosing the most suitable medium to fit a given context.
Knowing when to read, when to listen and how to switch from one to the other – or even combine the two modes – is about learning to adjust your way of learning, and, more broadly, to think for yourself.
A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!
Frédéric Bernard ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
– ref. Does listening to audiobooks improve learning? – https://theconversation.com/does-listening-to-audiobooks-improve-learning-267817
