I love audiobooks and consume them frequently but I personally don’t call it reading. It doesn’t feel like the same activity to me. What do you think?
I love audiobooks and consume them frequently but I personally don’t call it reading. It doesn’t feel like the same activity to me. What do you think?
Good thing is that this doesn’t really get to be an opinion. Well, I guess anything can be an opinion, but this one is objectively wrong if you differentiate them.
There have been several studies done on this, and brain scans show that physically reading with your eyes and listening to an audiobook trigger the exact same responses in the brain. They have the exact same effect, and your brain comprehends them the exact same.
Studies back in the 80s showed a direct correlation in listening comprehension and reading comprehension. They’re directly linked. In the 70s, studies showed that college students that listened to a short story could summarize it with equal accuracy to those that read it.
The science is pretty clear, physically reading a story and listening to it are the exact same and require the same amount of effort and attention to walk away with a good comprehension of the material.
This is accurate as far as it goes. There are differences in natural performance that disappear with with constraints.
There is no difference with simple material under any conditions. As the material becomes more complex, reading has superior comprehension for natural conditions. This is because readers will speed up or slow down as the material dictates, but listeners don’t usually have or use that control. Readers will also hop back and read difficult passages a second or third time, again something that listeners can’t/don’t.
If you constrain readers by forcing them to read at a fixed pace without review then the differences become minimal again.
So there are definitely differences, but they are tied to the performance characteristics of the medium rather than a cognitive difference.