Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Are Audiobooks 'Real Reading'?

Daniel Willingham writes about the question "Is listening to an Audio book 'cheating'?"
I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it. I’ll describe why in a bit, but for now I’ll just change it to “does your mind do more or less the same thing when you listening to an audio book and when you read print?”

The short answer is “mostly.”

An influential model of reading is the simple view (Gough & Tumner, 1986), which claims that two fundamental processes contribute to reading: decoding and language processing. “Decoding” obviously refers to figuring out words from print. “Language processing” refers to the same mental processes you use for oral language. Reading, as an evolutionary late-comer, must piggy-back on mental processes that already existed, and spoken communication does much of the lending.

So according to the simple model, listening to an audio book is exactly like reading print, except that the latter requires decoding and the former doesn’t.

Is the simple view right?

Some predictions you’d derive from the simple view are supported. For example, You’d expect that a lot of the difference in reading proficiency in the early grades would be due to differences in decoding. In later grades, most children are pretty fluent decoders so differences in decoding would be more due to processes that support comprehension. That prediction seems to be true (e.g., Tilstra et al, 2009).

Especially relevant to the question of audiobooks, you’d also predict that for typical adults (who decode fluently) listening comprehension and reading comprehension would be mostly the same thing. And experiments show very high correlations of scores on listening and reading comprehension tests in adults (Bell & Perfetti, 1994; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990).
[Read the rest for some examples of types of reading which an audiobook might result in better or worse comprehension than reading hard copy.]

This is a topic I think about slightly guiltily at times because it's got to the point where the majority of the books I read each year are on audiobook. I still very much enjoy getting the chance to sit down with a physical book and read. One of the things I enjoyed very much about our vacation last week was that I was finally able to read two books that had been sitting on my "to read" pile for months if not years. But for various reasons, I have very little time to sit down with a book at this time in my life. What little time I do have is snatched from potential sleep time. Yet somehow, while sitting up till one or two in the morning writing and getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night worked for me while actively composing on the novel, if I try to sit up and read until a similar time I find my vision blurring and I eventually have to give up and go to bed. Typing kept me awake in a way that reading does not, even if I very much want to stay up late reading.

The way that I try to make up for this is with audiobooks. On the average day I spend an hour in the car driving to and from work. That now becomes potential reading time. So does time spent mowing the lawn and sometimes doing dishes or other housework.

In some ways the experience of listening to books differs from reading in print -- not necessarily better or worse, just different. Particularly good readers become imprinted on a book's voice. Even if I read in print, I hear any Patrick O'Brian novel in Patrick Tull's voice, and Dance to the Music of Time now will always flow for me in the cadence of Simon Vance's tones. Because I'm reading while doing activities, particular memories of books become tied to particular places or activities: Mowing a difficult spot under the playscape is closely connected with a letter that Churchill's wife wrote to him about how he should improve the way he dealt with subordinates, putting up storm windows in the guest room is forever connected with a passage in War & Peace in which Nickolai rescues a Polish girl and her father.  It's not just that these passages of the books now remind me of these activities, but that returning to a place or activity will suddenly bring up a snatch of prose that I heard in connection with it.

Yet there is a guilty, cultural feeling that this isn't "real" reading. Perhaps this ties back to the way that we learn how to read. In my family, there was a strong tradition of reading aloud. Some favorite books (such as The Hobbit and Watership Down) I heard read aloud by my father before I read them myself. Yet even so, I went to school, filled out my BookIt forms to get pizzas at Pizza Hut, and got stars next to my name for the books I read myself. Being read to by a parent didn't count.

This is doubtless for the reason that Willingham gives in his post: children in the early grades are still learning to decode text and mentally turn that into comprehensible words. However, most people have this pretty well nailed by fifth grade or so. When I listen to a book instead of reading a printed copy, it's not because I find reading printed words difficult and listening is some sort of easy way out. "Cheating" is an idea that suggests I am somehow getting a benefit that I don't deserve. But is the audio-reader really getting an undeserved benefit by listening rather than reading pages? Is he somehow failing to put in the "work" of reading?

Not really, but it's still hard to shake that grade-school feeling that you're getting away with something.  So while this formulation of decoding versus comprehension will even more than before give me a rational assurance that I am "really reading" a book that I listen to, I doubt I'll be able to completely shake the feeling that I am "cheating" somehow.

12 comments:

Jennifer Fitz said...

Ironically, I find it easier to read a book than to listen to one. But I still know what you mean about that guilty feeling.

Darwin said...

If I was sitting somewhere where I could be reading, I'd definitely find reading a book faster and more enjoyable. For me, the "killer app" for audiobooks is that I can read while doing non-verbal activities such as driving or mowing the lawn.

bearing said...

I almost can't stand to listen to audiobooks, or anyone reading to me. I won't even let my kids read me their poetry, I'm always grabbing at the page and saying "but I want to SEE it" and they're always snatching it back, probably worried that I'll try to correct their spelling.

I'm visual to a fault.

Bernard Brandt said...

I would beg to differ, Brendan, with your fear that you are just 'passing' by allowing someone to read to you.

Rather, I would suggest that this is one of the most primordial of pleasures. We have long sat by the campfire while the bard tells us the tale. Books on tape is the most recent of updates of this pleasure.

My brother, who has an even more profound version of dyslexia than myself, is quite unable to read. But he has been listening to books for decades. I have described him elsewhere as the most literate analphabetic in my experience.

If you were to choose not to listen, nor to read, then I would pity you. Not so now. You do what you can.

Darwin said...

Very well put, sir.

Campbell said...

A classic novel in the hands of a good narrator creates a magical experience for my children.

Cristina said...

From the perspective of a language learner, reading and listening are two different skills; so if I were being technical, I'd say that an audiobook isn't "really" reading. (I've read, for instance, Twilight in German, with really good comprehension; but when I put on the Twilight audio book, I start scrambling for purchase all over again.)

Having said that, I've experienced both being "work," with listening being the much harder task by far. It's thrilling to imagine getting to the point where I can perfectly understand an audiobook while doing chores around the house! For me, "cheating" is sneaking a peak at the text (or at the subtitles in a film) in order to better understand what I'm hearing.

My own reading-related guilt has to do with most of my German reading being translations of texts originally written in English. Is this "real German"? Is riding a bike with training wheels "real bicycling"? Or going back to books, is a reading comic book with many panels that have no words at all "real reading"? And so on . . .

Darwin said...

That's very true. Because I can do it more slowly (and turn to a dictionary where necessary) I can start to puzzle our reading and writing in German but my speaking is weaker and my listening is weakest of all.

Jenny said...

I always had the guilty cultural feeling that audiobooks didn't really count as reading, but it was all I could manage while I was working. I definitely have visual images of my surroundings intimately interlocked with plot points in the various books I heard.

I thought when I quit working I would finally have time again to actually read and not cheat by listening. I did for awhile until the kitchen was delegated to me and I have yet to figure out how to get finished in there before way too late into the night.

Now that I have joined the information age via portable smartphone, I plan to revisit the audiobooks, even though I am home, even though it seems like I should have time to read.

I think that listening isn't quite the same thing as reading and decoding, but I've decided it isn't cheating either. It is more important to hear and contemplate the ideas contained in a book than to be particular about the method used to get those ideas into your mind.

Agnes said...

"From the perspective of a language learner, reading and listening are two different skills; so if I were being technical, I'd say that an audiobook isn't "really" reading. (I've read, for instance, Twilight in German, with really good comprehension; but when I put on the Twilight audio book, I start scrambling for purchase all over again.)

Having said that, I've experienced both being "work," with listening being the much harder task by far. It's thrilling to imagine getting to the point where I can perfectly understand an audiobook while doing chores around the house! For me, "cheating" is sneaking a peak at the text (or at the subtitles in a film) in order to better understand what I'm hearing."

As a native Hungarian speaker who speaks/reads several foreign languages, I know very well what you are talking about. However, I think this is not a process related to reading but a process related to the foreign language skill. This is a different sort of decoding/transcription, that of translating the non-native language into your own (or rather, in the case of listening, comprehending the pronounciation of the foreign language - since you understand the written text better). So I'd say it's "cheating" the way being read to by a parent is for a child, since to master the skill of understanding spoken foreign language, you need to practice that decoding until you can use it with no extra effort.

And I always try to fing something that was originally written in that other language if I try to further my reading/listening skills.

Cristina said...

Hi, Agnes! Isn't language learning fascinating?

I actually made a similar analogy a few days ago, when trying to listen to someone's German podcast. Since he was reading a funny story and doing the characters' voices (and yes, since I'm not as quick in German as I'd like to be) my comprehension must have been around 20%. I played the recording a second time and didn't do much better. Then I tried a third time, this time following along with the transcript he had also provided. And suddenly I could "understand" even totally unfamiliar words! I compared it to those book-and-cassette packs that were popular in the 70s and 80s. Pop the cassette into a player, read along with the book, turn the page at the tone, etc.

Thanks for the tip. My Twitter feed is almost 100% German these days, and my Spotify playlist is even better. But I'm concentrating on translations of novels because the last thing I want is to read Die Unendliche Geschichte before I'm ready for it.

Agnes said...

Cristina,
I agree entirely, I used to do a lot of rewind/replay listening to musicals reading the transcript. As for translations, in my language the quality of translations declined dramatically in the last decades, especially for bestsellers the publisher wanted to publish quickly. I don't know about German, but since the tendency to drop grammar/stylistic standards seems to be universal, maybe you should try something that was translated earlier. I found children/youth literature particularly useful.