Listening counts as reading

Is listening to a book really reading it? Anyone who has finished an audiobook and felt faintly guilty has asked. In 2016 three researchers tested it. Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal gave ninety-one adults the same section of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken three ways. One group read it as an e-book, one listened to the audiobook, and one read while listening. Everyone took a comprehension test straight afterward and again two weeks later.

Nobody won. There was no significant difference among the three groups on either test. Listening did not cost anything, and reading while listening did not either. The words arrived through the eye, the ear, or both, and the same amount stayed.

The honest limits. These were adults in their own language, one nonfiction book, and a test of comprehension rather than of words learned. The study says nothing about learning a language. But it does settle the question it asked, which is the one the guilty audiobook listener has: taking a book in by ear is not a lesser way of taking it in.

For a language you are learning, the two doors are not the same door, and that is the point. Text shows you the written shape of a word. Audio tells you how it sounds, where it begins and ends, and keeps you moving at the pace of the sentence instead of stalling on every unknown. Used together they give your memory two handles on every word instead of one.

The learner-side evidence backs that up. Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua had second-language learners take stories by reading, by listening, or both, and reading while listening produced the most vocabulary learned and kept it best over three months. Reading alone came second, listening alone last.

So do both. Pick a passage you can mostly follow, listen while you read, and stop only for the word that blocks the sentence. When the sound and the text do not connect, play that line once more. That is exactly how Aloglot reads to you: the voice and the words together, each word lit as it is spoken, and any word explained on a tap.

Sources

• Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal (2016). Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension. SAGE Open, 6(3).
• Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 136–163.