Does Audiobooks Enhance Learning?

Whether it is documents found in school textbooks or narrative fiction studied in literature classes, reading texts remains a pillar of learning. But the rise of audio books opens up new possibilities for approaches.

Can we consider listening to literary works on the program rather than reading them in the traditional way? And, in this case, does listening to a text allow the same understanding as reading it?

Reading or listening: seemingly limited differences

In a meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research and taking into account the results of 46 studies conducted between 1955 and 2020, including a total of 4,687 child and adult participants, Virginia Clinton-Lisell, teacher-researcher in educational psychology at the University of North Dakota, finds that levels of comprehension do not differ significantly when the same texts are read or listened to.

This result can be compared to a study by Madison Berl and his colleagues, published in 2010 in the journal Brain and Languageshowing that children aged 7 to 12 activate common brain regions when listening and reading stories. These regions notably include a fronto-temporal network involved in semantic and syntactic processing shared between the two exploration modalities, which the authors describe as the “comprehension cortex”.

A comparable network, to which the parietal region was added, was also activated by adults who listened to or read the same story in the study by Fatma Deniz and her colleagues, published in 2019 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Adapt your pace with classical reading

However, the Clinton-Lisell meta-analysis also highlights that comprehension becomes better in reading than in listening when participants can read at their own pace. Reading in fact offers the possibility of freely adjusting your speed: slowing down when faced with difficulty, going back or checking information. This cognitive control is not possible when listening to a text whose rhythm is fixed, without the possibility of going back as naturally.

Furthermore, reading turns out to be more effective than listening when general and inferential comprehension is assessed, whereas this difference is not found for literal comprehension.

Listening, which imposes a rhythm and a sound structure, makes it more difficult to implement comprehension strategies and generate inferences – that is, links between the ideas from the text and the knowledge and memories available to each person. Reading, on the contrary, offers greater freedom of mental organization and promotes interpretative creativity, supported by processes of attentional regulation and cognitive control.

When it comes to getting students to develop deeper thinking, reading remains the most effective modality. It stimulates the creation of inferences, essential for establishing the coherence of the text – a guarantee of a detailed and deep understanding.

With listening, an emotional dimension

However, listening to a text has certain advantages, particularly in terms of lived experience.

It involves the perception of voices, intonations and prosodies which, for people who are sensitive to them, provide a more direct affective and emotional dimension than silent reading. It can also facilitate access to the text for students with reading difficulties, by reducing visual load and supporting continuity of attention.

However, listening also requires auditory attention, which in itself constitutes a specific skill, mobilizing both working memory and sustained attention. It requires maintaining sustained vigilance in the face of a continuous verbal flow, which can represent a challenge for certain students, particularly those with difficulty concentrating or auditory processing. Listening then promotes an auditory immersion likely to improve the overall understanding of the story, even if it does not always offer the same degree of control over the details of the text.

This voice can strengthen the listener's engagement and enrich the reception of a narrative text, by accentuating the presence of the characters and the rhythm of the story. Reading, for its part, allows a form of inner dialogue and a suspension of time conducive to reflection.

The anthropologist Michèle Petit describes very subtly, in her work Read the world (2014), the strength of the reading experience at any age. In the chapter entitled “What’s the point of reading?” “, she evokes several virtues of reading, including the ability to withdraw from the tumult, to open up to other worlds and to build oneself. The section “Looking up from your book” illustrates this unique experience particularly well: that of reading which allows you to suspend the thread of the text to allow a thought, an image or a memory to arise – something that listening, more linear, favors less.

Form a virtuous cognitive assembly

Literature professor Katherine Hayles offers in several of her works – the most recent being Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (2025) – the concept of “cognitive assemblage” to refer to hybrid systems in which humans interact with technologies that extend their mental capacities. If this framework primarily concerns the relationship between humans and computers, it can be broadened to the way in which we become one with the media of reading and listening.

Reading a text or listening to it involves distinct forms of cognitive assemblages, each mobilizing our senses, our attention, our memory and our emotions differently. Learning to recognize these differences – and to choose the most suitable modality according to the aim (in-depth reading or immersive listening) and according to our preferences (more visual and tactile exploration, even olfactory, or auditory) – amounts to forming a virtuous cognitive assembly, capable of taking advantage of the richness of each mode of interaction with language and culture.

For the school, the challenge is therefore not to choose between reading and listening, but to teach students to recognize the specific value of each mode and to combine them in a thoughtful manner.

This awareness of the methods of exploring texts is part of a differentiated pedagogy, attentive to learning styles. It invites you to develop real education in metacognition: learning to observe your way of learning, to adjust your pace and to choose the most appropriate support depending on the context.

Knowing when to read, when to listen and how to move from one to the other – or even combining the two modes – means learning to adjust your way of learning, and, more broadly, to think for yourself.