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

Can we consider listening to literary works on the syllabus rather than reading them in the traditional way? And, if so, does listening to a text allow for 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, a professor and researcher in educational psychology at the University of North Dakota, found that comprehension levels do not differ significantly when the same texts are read or listened to .

This finding parallels a study by Madison Berl and colleagues, published in 2010 in the journal Brain and Language , which showed that children aged 7 to 12 years old activated common brain regions when listening to and reading stories . These regions include a frontotemporal network involved in semantic and syntactic processing shared between the two exploration modalities, which the authors refer to 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 colleagues , published in 2019 in The Journal of Neuroscience .

Adapting your pace with classic reading

However, Clinton-Lisell’s meta-analysis also highlights that comprehension improves in reading than in listening when participants can read at their own pace. Reading offers the opportunity to freely adjust one’s speed: slowing down when faced with difficulty, going back, or checking information. This cognitive control is not possible when listening to a text with a fixed pace, without the natural possibility of rewinding.

Moreover, reading was found to be more effective than listening when general and inferential comprehension was assessed, whereas this difference was 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, connections between ideas from the text and each person’s knowledge and memories. Reading, on the other hand, offers greater freedom of mental organization and promotes interpretative creativity, supported by processes of attentional regulation and cognitive control.

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

With listening, an emotional dimension

Listening to a text does, however, have certain advantages, particularly in terms of lived experience.

It involves the perception of voices, intonations, and prosodies, which, for those 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 the visual load and supporting continuity of attention.

However, listening also requires auditory attention, which is a specific skill in itself, mobilizing both working memory and sustained attention. It requires maintaining sustained vigilance in the face of a continuous flow of words, which can be challenging for some students, particularly those with difficulty concentrating or processing audio. Listening then promotes auditory immersion that can improve 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-over 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 for a form of internal dialogue and a suspension of time conducive to reflection.

In her book Lire le monde (Reading the World ) (2014), anthropologist Michèle Petit very subtly describes the power of the reading experience at any age. In the chapter entitled “What’s the point of reading?”, she discusses several virtues of reading, including the ability to withdraw from the hustle and bustle, 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 that allows you to pause the thread of the text to allow a thought, an image, or a memory to emerge—something that listening, which is more linear, does less well.

Forming a virtuous cognitive assembly

Literature professor Katherine Hayles proposes in several of her books—most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts (2025)—the concept of “cognitive assemblage” to describe hybrid systems in which humans interact with technologies that extend their mental capacities. While this framework primarily concerns the relationship between humans and computers, it can be extended to how we become one with the media of reading and listening.

Reading a text or listening to it involves distinct forms of cognitive assemblages, each of which engages our senses, attention, memory, and emotions differently. Learning to recognize these differences—and to choose the most appropriate modality depending on the goal (in-depth reading or immersive listening) and our preferences (visual and tactile, or even olfactory, or auditory exploration)—is tantamount to forming a virtuous cognitive assemblage, capable of taking advantage of the richness of each mode of interaction with language and culture.

For schools, 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 thoughtfully.

This awareness of the ways in which texts are explored is part of a differentiated pedagogy, attentive to learning styles. It invites the development of a true education in metacognition: learning to observe one’s way of learning, to adjust one’s pace and to choose the most appropriate support according to the context.

Knowing when to read, when to listen, and how to switch between them—or even combine the two—means learning to adjust your way of learning and, more broadly, to think for yourself.

Author Bio: Frédéric Bernard is a Lecturer in Neuropsychology at the University of Strasbourg