It happens automatically.Īccording to the simple model of reading, then, you really can’t consider listening to a book to be easier than reading it. But by about late elementary school, decoding becomes so second-nature that it isn’t any additional “work” for your brain. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.” Listeners and readers retain about equal understanding of the passages they’ve consumed, in other words.ĭecoding, by contrast, is specific to reading, Willingham said this is indeed one more step your mind has to take when reading a print book as compared to listening to the audiobook version. As science writer Olga Khazan noted in 2011, a “ 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension - suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well. (It’s obviously much more complicated than that this is what’s known as the “simple view” of reading, but it’s sufficient for thinking about the question at hand.) Researchers have studied the question of comprehension for decades, and “what you find is very high correlations of reading comprehension and listening comprehension,” Willingham said. And then there is language processing, or comprehension - that is, figuring out the syntax, the story, et cetera. There are two basic processes happening when you’re reading: There is decoding, or translating the strings of letters into words that mean something. And that is true, sort of - but it stops being true somewhere around the fifth grade. And so they think you’re getting the rewarding part of it … and it’s the difficult part that you’ve somehow gotten out of.” So that implies, Willingham argues, that to your brain, listening is less “work” than reading.
“It’s not that you’re missing out on something, or it’s not that this experience could be better for you,” he told Science of Us.
Because that does seem to be the typical argument, Willingham said. But first, consider what that assertion - that listening is cheating - is saying: It suggests that the listener got some reward without putting in the work. His reasoning reveals some fascinating insights about the way the brain makes sense of language, whether written or spoken. The Lasting Benefits of Growing Up Around Books So, according to that understanding of the question: No, audiobooks are not cheating. (His opening line: “I’ve been asked this question a lot and I hate it.”) If, he argues, you take the question from the perspective of cognitive psychology - that is, the mental processes involved - there is no real difference between listening to a book and reading it. (That one was about teaching children to read he’s got another book out next spring about adults and reading.) He is very tired of this question, and so, recently, he wrote a blog post addressing it. This question - whether or not listening to an audiobook is “cheating” - is one University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham gets fairly often, especially ever since he published a book, in 2015, on the science of reading. She never substituted the audiobook for the print version again (or, if she did, she never again admitted it). Never mind that no one could exactly articulate how or why it was cheating it just felt like it was, and others would agree. That, the rest of the group decided together, is definitely cheating. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month’s selection instead of reading it. As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club.
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