There is no doubt that in these busy times in which multicasting abounds, an audiobook offers many advantages: We can consume it while driving, while running, while lying in bed with our eyes closed, or even while doing many other more cognitively important tasks.
However, There are some substantial differences between reading a book and listening to a book..
The commitment and presence of the narrator
Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of the specialized mental processes dedicated to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the understanding of written language. In fact, the investigations show that adults get almost identical scores on a reading test if they listen to the passages instead of reading them.
However it is not always so. Audiobooks work when the texts are flat, simple, without complex metaphors, without cryptic images. Because there are denser texts that require reducing the reading speed, and even rereading a fragment, or even stopping at a word. Enjoy what it evokes in us as we delight in the taste of coffee.
Thus, A study compared how well students learned about a scientific topic in a 22-minute podcast versus a printed article. Although students spent equivalent time on each format, in a questionnaire written two days later, readers they obtained a result of 81 percent and the listeners, 59 percent.
In other words: reading is something that is done, that requires commitment, while listening is something that happens, that can happen even if we are not committed to the task. Audiobooks progress with or without our participation. We can tune in, pay attention to the book while our mind wanders to another topic at hand, and the book will still move forward.
That is to say, an average reader will be less involved in an audiobook. It will process it less intensely.
Furthermore, the audiobook lacks an internal narrator: the narrator is the one who has been hired to read the audiobook. There is an imposed prosody, that is, a tone and a tempo. Because, although writing lacks symbols for prosody, experienced readers infer it as they go. In A study, subjects listened to a recording of the voice of someone speaking quickly or slowly. Everyone then silently read the same text, supposedly written by the person whose voice they had just heard. Those who heard the speaker speak quickly read the text faster than those who heard the speaker speak slowly.
Also, not everything is based on tempo or learning more or less. Even reading fiction, which on the surface seems like just a hobby, can have fruitful results on many levels, as you can see in the following video:
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The news
Reading a book is not the same as listening to an audiobook: commitment, understanding and presence of the narrator
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
