BY NAOMI BARR
“Oral storytelling is a tradition far older than written storytelling. It all counts!”
JEN_MONNIER
“If the purpose of a book is to stimulate the imagination, broaden perspectives, and improve vocabulary, who cares if we use our eyes or our ears for it?”
LALALUNCHBOX
“The opposition to audiobooks is so often grounded in snobbery or ableism.”
LAURAADETRE
“Yes, you’re consuming the same content by listening to an audiobook, but you’re not reading—you’re being read to.”
JULIESHENKMAN
“You wouldn’t say your infant ‘reads’ a book when you read it to them.”
OPTIMISTICPHOENIX
“I don’t think it counts as reading, which has a clear definition. Maybe we should come up with a new word.”
VANIVONNE
Despite what some purists might think, having a book read to you is not cheating, and research shows that it stacks up to traditional reading in nearly every way. A 2021 meta-analysis of 46 studies found that our understanding of written material is effectively the same whether we read the page or have someone read it to us.
“It’s only in the last few thousand years that the brain has needed to make sense of the printed word,” says Nina Kraus, PhD, professor of neurology and otolaryngology at Northwestern University’s School of Communication, who wrote Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World. “The hearing brain is vast and engages other senses, including vision. Plus, sound is tightly linked to memory,” she says.
In fact, neuroscientists believe that when we read, we co-opt many of the neural pathways that were developed to decipher and interpret oral language, Kraus adds. So both reading and listening involve the same cognitive process of tying together and retaining ideas, says Virginia Clinton-Lisell, PhD, associate professor of education, health, and behavior at the University of North Dakota and author of the aforementioned 2021 meta-analysis.
“When we talk about reading, it’s been such a finite conversation,” says Salika Lawrence, PhD, a member of the Library of Congress’s Literacy Awards Board. “We need to broaden our definition so it’s more inclusive.” Ultimately, Clinton-Lisell points out, “the best way to read is whatever way you’re going to do it.”
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Illustration by Joel Holland