Even for people who love books, finding the opportunity to read can
be a challenge. Many, then, rely on audiobooks, a convenient
alternative to old-fashioned reading. You can listen to the latest
bestseller while commuting or cleaning up the house.
But is listening to
a book really the same as reading one?
“I was a fan of
audiobooks, but I always viewed them as cheating,” says Beth
Rogowsky, an associate professor of education at Bloomsburg
University of Pennsylvania.
For a 2016 study,
Rogowsky put her assumptions to the test. One 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 both read and listened
at the same time. Afterward, everyone took a quiz designed to measure
how well they had absorbed the material. “We found no significant
differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading
and listening simultaneously,” Rogowsky says.
Score one for
audiobooks? Maybe. But Rogowsky’s study used e-readers rather than
traditional print books, and there’s some evidence that reading on
a screen reduces learning and comprehension compared to reading from
printed text. So it’s possible that, had her study pitted
traditional books against audiobooks, old-school reading might have
come out on top.
If you’re
wondering why printed books may be better than screen-based reading,
it may have to do with your inability to gauge where you are in an
electronic book. “As you’re reading a narrative, the sequence of
events is important, and knowing where you are in a book helps you
build that arc of narrative,” says Daniel Willingham, a professor
of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Raising
Kids Who Read. While e-readers try to replicate this by telling you
how much of a book you have left, in a percentage or length of time
to the end, this doesn’t seem to have the same narrative-orienting
effect as reading from a traditional book.
The fact that
printed text is anchored to a specific location on a page also seems
to help people remember it better than screen-based text, according
to more research on the spatial attributes of traditional printed
media. All this may be relevant to the audiobook vs. book debate
because, like digital screens, audiobooks deny users the spatial cues
they would use while reading from printed text.
“About 10 to 15%
of eye movements during reading are actually regressive—meaning
[the eyes are] going back and re-checking,” Willingham explains.
“This happens very quickly, and it’s sort of seamlessly stitched
into the process of reading a sentence.” He says this reading quirk
almost certainly bolsters comprehension, and it may be roughly
comparable to a listener asking for a speaker to “hold on” or
repeat something. “Even as you’re asking, you’re going over in
your mind’s ear what the speaker just said,” he says.
Theoretically, you can also pause or jump back while listening to an
audio file. “But it’s more trouble,” he adds.
Another
consideration is that whether we’re reading or listening to a text,
our minds occasionally wander. Seconds (or minutes) can pass before
we snap out of these little mental sojourns 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 the point at which you zoned
out. It’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording, Daniel
says. Especially if you’re grappling with a complicated text, the
ability to quickly backtrack and re-examine the material may aid
learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while
listening. “Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight
break,” he says. This brief pause may create space for your brain
to store or savor the information you’re absorbing.
Daniel coauthored a
2010 study that found students who listened to a podcast lesson
performed worse on a comprehension quiz than students who read the
same lesson on paper. “And the podcast group did a lot worse, not a
little worse,” he says. Compared to the readers, the listeners
scored an average of 28% lower on the quiz—about the difference
between an A or a D grade, he says.
Interestingly, at
the start of the experiment, almost all the students wanted to be in
the podcast group. “But then right before I gave them the quiz, I
asked them again which group they would want 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 as much.”
He says it’s
possible that, with practice, the listeners might be able to make up
ground on the readers. “We get good at what we do, and you could
become a better listener if you trained yourself to listen more
critically,” he says. (The same could be true of screen-based
reading; some research suggests that people who practice “screen
learning” get better at it.)
But there may also
be some “structural hurdles” that impede learning from audio
material, Daniels says. For one thing, you can’t underline or
highlight something you hear. And many of the “This is important!”
cues that show up in text books—things like bolded words or boxed
bits of critical info—aren’t easily emphasized in audio-based
media.
But audiobooks also
have some strengths. Human beings have been sharing information
orally for tens of thousands of years, Willingham says, while the
printed word is a much more recent invention. “When we’re
reading, we’re using parts of the brain that evolved for other
purposes, and we’re MacGyvering them so they can be applied to the
cognitive task of reading,” he explains. Listeners, on the other
hand, can derive a lot of information from a speaker’s inflections
or intonations. Sarcasm is much more easily communicated via audio
than printed text. And people who hear Shakespeare spoken out loud
tend to glean a lot of meaning from the actor’s delivery, he adds.
However, a final
factor may tip the comprehension and retention scales firmly in favor
of reading, and that’s the issue 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 more or
less perform on autopilot—stuff like driving or doing the
dishes—take up enough of your attention to impede learning. “I
listen to audiobooks all the time while I’m driving, but I would
not try to listen to anything important to my work,” he says.
All that said, if
you’re reading or listening for leisure—not for work or study—the
differences between audiobooks and print books are probably “small
potatoes,” he adds. “I think there’s enormous overlap in
comprehension of an audio text compared to comprehension of a print
text.”
So go ahead and
“cheat.” Your book club buddies will never know.