Even for people who love books, finding the opportunity to read can be a challenge. many, then, rely on audiobooks, a convenient alternative to traditional reading. you can listen to the latest bestseller while traveling or cleaning the house.
But, is listening to a book really the same as reading it?
You are reading: Audio books versus reading
“I was a fan of audiobooks, but I always saw them as cheating,” says beth rogowsky, associate professor of education at pennsylvania’s bloomsburg university.
For a 2016 study, Rogowsky put his assumptions to the test. A group in her study listened to sections of Unbroken, a nonfiction book about World War II by Laura Hillenbrand, while a second group read the same parts on an e-reader. she included a third group that she read and listened to at the same time. afterwards, everyone answered a questionnaire designed to measure how well they had assimilated the material. “We found no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously,” Rogowsky says.
rate one for audiobooks? maybe. But Rogowsky’s study used e-readers instead of traditional print books, and there is some evidence that reading on a screen reduces learning and comprehension compared to reading print. So it’s possible that if his study had compared traditional books to audiobooks, old-school reading might have come out on top.
If you’re wondering why print books might be better than on-screen reading, it may have to do with your inability to gauge where you are in an e-book. “While you’re reading a narrative, the sequence of events is important, and knowing where you are in a book helps you build that narrative arc,” says Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Raising Children Who Read. while e-readers try to replicate this by telling you how much of a book you have left, either as a percentage or as a period of time until the end, this doesn’t seem to have the same narrative-orientation effect as reading a traditional book. .
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The fact that print text is anchored to a specific location on a page also appears to help people remember it better than text on screen, according to more research on the spatial attributes of traditional print media. All of this may be relevant to the audiobook vs. book debate because, like digital screens, audiobooks deny users the spatial cues they would use when reading print.
The self-directed rhythms associated with reading can also differentiate books from audiobooks.
“About 10 to 15% of eye movements during reading are actually regressive, meaning [the eyes] go back and recheck,” Willingham explains. “This happens very quickly, and is seamlessly integrated into the process of reading a sentence.” he says that this reading quirk almost certainly reinforces comprehension, and may be roughly comparable to a listener asking a speaker to “wait” or repeat something. “Even when you’re asking, you’re replaying in your mind what the speaker just said,” he says. in theory, he can also pause or rewind while listening to an audio file. “But it’s more problematic,” he adds.
another consideration is that, whether we are reading or listening to a text, our mind wanders from time to time. it can be seconds (or minutes) before we snap out of these little mental dwellings and refocus our attention, says david daniel, a professor of psychology at james madison university and a member of a national academy of sciences project aimed at understanding how people learn.
If you’re reading, it’s pretty easy to go back and find where you got distracted. it’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording, says daniel. Especially if you’re dealing with complicated text, the ability to quickly go back and re-examine the material can aid learning, and this is probably easier to do while reading than listening. “Turning the page of a book also gives you a little break,” she says. this brief pause can create space for her brain to store or savor the information she is absorbing.
daniel co-authored a 2010 study that found that students who listened to a podcast lesson performed worse on a comprehension test than students who read the same lesson on paper. “And the podcast group fared much worse, not a little worse,” he says. Compared to readers, listeners scored 28% lower on average on the quiz, about the difference between an a or a d, he says.
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Interestingly, at the beginning of the experiment, almost all of the students wanted to be in the podcast group. “But then, right before I gave them the test, I asked them again which group they would like to be in, and most of them had changed their minds: they wanted to be in the reading group,” Daniel says. “They knew they hadn’t learned that much.”
He says it’s possible that, with practice, listeners can gain ground on readers. “We’re good at what we do, and you could become a better listener if you trained yourself to listen more critically,” he says. (The same might be true for screen-based reading; some research suggests that people who practice “screen learning” get better at it.)
But there may also be some “structural barriers” to learning from the audio material, Daniels says. for one thing, you can’t underline or highlight something you hear. and many of the “this is important!” clues that appear in textbooks, such as words in bold or bits of critical information in boxes, are not easily emphasized in audio-based media.
but audiobooks also have some strengths. Humans have been sharing information orally for tens of thousands of years, says Willingham, while the printed word is a much more recent invention. “When we read, we use parts of the brain that evolved for other purposes and transform them so that they can be applied to the cognitive task of reading,” she explains. listeners, on the other hand, can get a lot of information from a speaker’s inflections or intonations. sarcasm is much more easily communicated through audio than print. And people who listen to Shakespeare out loud tend to get a lot of meaning out of the actor’s performance, she adds.
However, one final factor can tip the balance of comprehension and retention firmly in favor of reading, and that is the problem of multitasking. “If you’re trying to learn while doing two things, you’re not going to learn as well,” Willingham says. even activities that you can do more or less on autopilot, like driving or doing the dishes, require enough attention to impede learning. “I listen to audiobooks all the time while driving, but I wouldn’t try to listen to anything important for my job,” she says.
All that said, if you read or listen for pleasure, not for work or study, the differences between audiobooks and print books are probably “little potatoes,” he adds. “I think there is a huge overlap in the comprehension of an audio text compared to the comprehension of a printed text.”
so go ahead and “cheat”. your book club friends will never know.
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