Why Reading Still Matters When Listening Is an Option

Imagine, for a moment, the distant future. Close your eyes and consider what life could be like several hundred years from now.

Will humans be intergalactic travellers, racing from one galaxy to another? Perhaps we will inhabit spacecraft, underwater settlements or planets beneath purple skies.

Then imagine the bedroom of a future teenager. A luminous display may be fixed to the wall. Through the window, perhaps you can glimpse Saturn’s rings, Neptune’s blue radiance or the extraordinary sights of the seabed.

But ask yourself this: would there be a book in that room?

Open your eyes again. There is likely to be a book close by, whether on your bedside table or tucked beneath the bed. Some people own just one, while others keep a large collection.

Books remain present even now, in a world overflowing with podcasts. Why? When we can hear almost anything, why is reading still important?

As a language scientist, I examine the ways biological influences and social experiences affect language. My research investigates how the brain handles spoken and written language, using methods including MRI and EEG.

The aim is identical whether you are reading a book or hearing a recording: to understand. Yet the two activities are not precisely the same. They aid comprehension in distinct ways. Listening cannot deliver every advantage provided by reading, just as reading cannot supply everything offered by listening. Both matter, but neither can replace the other.

How the brain processes reading and listening

Some of the language and cognitive systems in your brain are used for both listening and reading. However, the brain also carries out different tasks according to how the information reaches you.

While you read, your brain performs considerable unseen work. It identifies letter shapes, links them with speech sounds, associates those sounds with meanings and then connects meaning across words, sentences and entire books. Visual features in text, including punctuation, paragraph breaks and bold type, help direct comprehension. You are also able to set your own pace.

By contrast, listening means your brain must keep up with the speaker’s pace. Since spoken language quickly disappears, listeners have to depend on cognitive abilities, including memory, to retain what has just been said.

Speech is also an unbroken flow rather than a sequence of clearly divided words. As people speak, sounds merge through a process known as coarticulation. The listener’s brain must therefore rapidly locate word boundaries and match sounds with meaning.

In addition to recognising the words, the listener’s brain needs to consider tone, who is speaking and the surrounding context in order to understand the speaker’s intended meaning.

'Easier' depends on the person and context

People often believe listening is simpler than reading, although that is generally not true. Studies indicate that listening may be more difficult than reading, particularly when information is complex or unfamiliar.

Understanding through listening and reading is more alike with straightforward narratives, such as fiction, than with nonfiction books or essays that set out facts, ideas or explanations of how things function. My research indicates that genre shapes the way people read. Indeed, different text types depend on specialised networks in the brain.

Fiction draws on brain areas involved in understanding social situations and narratives. Nonfiction, in contrast, uses a brain network that supports strategic thought and attention directed towards goals.

From a practical perspective, reading challenging material is often easier than hearing it. Readers can readily navigate the text, return to sections they do not understand or underline key passages to review afterwards.

Someone listening who loses track of a particular point has to stop and rewind. That is less precise than looking over a page, and it may disrupt the listening flow and hinder comprehension.

Nevertheless, listening can be easier for certain people, including those with developmental dyslexia. People with developmental dyslexia often find it difficult to use their written-language knowledge to pronounce written words accurately, a process called decoding. Listening enables the brain to obtain meaning without going through the demanding process of decoding.

Engagement with reading and audio material

Engagement is one final consideration. Here, it means being mentally present: concentrating actively, processing information and relating ideas to knowledge you already have.

People frequently listen while doing other tasks, such as exercising, cooking or browsing online - activities that would be difficult to combine with reading. In one study, researchers asked university students to read material or listen to a podcast in their own time. Those who read scored significantly higher in a quiz than those who listened.

Many students in the listening group said they had multitasked, for example by clicking around on their computers as the podcast played. This matters especially because attention seems to be more crucial to listening comprehension than to reading comprehension.

So, reading continues to matter even when listening is available. The two activities provide different benefits, and they are not interchangeable.

The most effective way to learn is not to regard books and audio recordings as equivalent, but to understand how each operates and use both to gain a better understanding of the world.

Stephanie N. Del Tufo, Assistant Professor of Education & Human Development, University of Delaware

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.