Does Listening Count as Reading?

Listen to The Daily Reflection

Alex and Sam explore what audiobooks share with print, what they do differently, and why comprehension, pleasure and literacy skills should not be collapsed into one definition of reading.

Researched through 2026-09-26T13:33:33.548Z. AI-generated conversation, reviewed before publication.

Alex: You finish an audiobook while washing up. You loved the ending, you have opinions about the characters—and then someone says, “But you haven’t actually read it.” Hang on. What, exactly, are we counting?

Sam: Getting the story? I’d count it. Looking at written words? That’s a different activity. I think the argument gets stuck because we use “reading” for both.

Alex: So let’s put the guilt aside. If I listen instead of looking at the page, do I understand less?

Sam: Not necessarily. A 2016 experiment gave 91 adults the same nonfiction material as audio, e-text, or both together. The researchers found no statistically significant difference in comprehension, either immediately or two weeks later.

Alex: That sounds like a clean win for the audiobook. Except—small warning label—it was one excerpt and a particular group of college-educated, native English-speaking adults. Not every book. Not every reader.

Sam: Exactly. Change the readers and the task, and the picture can change. In a 2024 study of 46 English learners, reading along with audio beat listening alone. But it didn’t beat silent reading.

Alex: So two channels aren’t automatically better than one. A review covering 30 studies and nearly two thousand people found a small overall benefit from reading while listening, compared with reading alone. Small is doing some work there.

Sam: And here’s the really useful wrinkle: when readers controlled their own pace, that review found no reliable advantage. My take? Being able to stop and go back may matter more than whether you’ve got headphones on.

Alex: Also: understanding now and remembering later aren’t the same test. In one study of short health-information passages, immediate comprehension was similar for text and audio, but people recalled more after reading. That’s a specific result, not a verdict on novels.

Sam: Which is why I’d ask, “What do you want from this book?” A plot to disappear into? An argument to pick apart? A sentence you want to sit with? Those are different evenings. They don’t need a single winning format.

Alex: And there’s pleasure. A voice can make a line land differently. That’s a reason to choose audio—not a claim that a beautiful voice magically improves your memory. You can love the performance and still want to rewind.

Sam: Yes! My answer is: you’ve engaged with the book. Whether you call that reading is partly a question of language. Just don’t confuse understanding a story with practising how written words look and work. These comprehension studies don’t settle every question about learning to read.

Alex: Then here’s the question I’d rather leave you with: if the same book feels different in another voice—or on a page—have you lost something, gained something, or found a reason to meet it twice?

Sources

• Research Surveys Press Release — Homepage — 2026-06-05

• Does Modality Matter? The Effects of Reading, Listening, and Dual Modality on Comprehension - Beth A. Rogowsky, Barbara M. Calhoun, Paula Tallal, 2016 — 2016

• Scaffolding comprehension with reading while listening and the role of reading speed and text complexity - Hui - 2024 - The Modern Language Journal - Wiley Online Library — 2024-02-07

• "Does Reading while Listening to Text Improve Comprehension Compared to" by Virginia Clinton-Lisell — 2023

• A comparison of text versus audio for information comprehension with future uses for smart speakers - PubMed

• Impacts of voice pleasantness and familiarity on enjoyment and engagement with spoken narratives | Sciety — 2026

Still open

• The supplied research does not establish that audiobook listening produces the same outcomes as print across all ages, genres, texts, languages, or educational contexts.

• The evidence does not determine whether listening should count as reading for a particular classroom, assessment, or institutional definition.

• The cited studies do not establish broad effects on decoding, spelling, punctuation, visual word recognition, or long-term academic development.

• The voice-quality findings come from a preprint and therefore should not be treated as equivalent in evidentiary status to completed peer-reviewed research.

• The supplied evidence does not show whether audiobook comprehension remains comparable to print for substantially longer works or more complex texts.