It’s exciting the places that reading can take you. What happens when a reading researcher delves into the authenticity behind listening to audio books. Is it as good as reading a book? Can the ear replace the eye? Well, they are both good, there being a lot of ‘overlap’ except when it comes to intent- sarcasm works better with a voice.
“Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language. Indeed, research shows that adults get nearly identical scores on a reading test if they listen to the passages instead of reading them.”
It’s interesting that listening may not aid learning that much because when you read for a test, you try to understand it and that only happens when you reread. Also, paragraphs are markers that audible books can not provide.
Read Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It? by Daniel T. Willingham for a brilliant analysis.
