Beyond the Page

What Science Reveals About Reading, Listening, and Meaning 

For centuries, the book has been associated with a physical object: pages held in our hands, words moving through our eyes, and the quiet act of reading. But books have never belonged only to the page. They live in the minds of the people who encounter them. 

According to a 2025 Ipsos poll conducted for NPR, roughly forty percent of American adults believe that listening to an audiobook is not really a form of reading. (1)That is not a fringe opinion. It is closer to two out of every five people placing the audio version of a book into a different category than the printed one. 

Underneath that number sits a real belief: that listening is a shortcut, a workaround, maybe even a small act of cheating. That belief is worth examining because it shapes real decisions. It influences what is recommended to a child with dyslexia, how a parent uses a forty-minute commute to school, and whether someone chooses to listen to a book on a run or sit still and read at the kitchen table. 

The research on this question is worth examining directly.  Don’t just believe what a podcast host asserted or an author claimed on a book tour, but examine the studies themselves. What emerges complicates the tidy “they’re basically the same” narrative common in a lot of pop-science writing, and it complicates the opposite “real reading only happens on the page” narrative even more. The truth, as usual, is more useful than either slogan because it leads to a better question. The question is not whether listening counts as reading. The question is what listening does well, where it falls short, and how that should shape the choices we make for ourselves and others.

 

The first difference: getting the words 

Start with what is obviously different. Reading text requires decoding.  Which is mapping printed symbols to sounds and words, a skill that takes years of instruction to automate. Listening does not require this kind of decoding.  The words arrive as already assembled speech rather than as printed symbols.  Although the listener still has to process the sounds, recognize the words and construct meaning, the translation of printed symbols is removed from the equation.   

This is the foundation of the Simple View of Reading, the model Gough and Tunmer proposed in 1986.  Reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension ability. Both matter. If either is weak, comprehension can suffer, even when the other ability is strong. A reader can decode the words on the page but still struggle to understand what they mean, just as strong language comprehension cannot compensate for an inability to decode the words. 

Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, introduced in 2001, builds on the same basic idea

but gives us a more detailed way to understand what is happening. The Rope describes skilled reading as two broad strands working together: word recognition and language comprehension.

Word recognition is the work of getting the words off the page. It includes phonological awareness, decoding, and the growing ability to recognize familiar words automatically. Language comprehension is the work of making sense of those words. It includes vocabulary, background knowledge, and verbal reasoning, along with other language skills that help a reader build meaning.

The two strands become increasingly woven together as reading develops. That matters because a child can struggle for very different reasons. One child may have difficulty recognizing the words on the page. Another may read the words accurately but have difficulty understanding what those words mean. The Reading Rope gives educators a way to look beyond the broad label of “reading difficulty” and ask a more useful question: Where, specifically, is the breakdown?

A child with strong language comprehension who has not yet automated decoding may struggle to read for meaning, even though the understanding is there. That child is exactly who may benefit from an audiobook. Listening removes the demand of decoding print and allows the child to experience the language, ideas, and imagination of a text while decoding skills continue to develop. Many students with dyslexia have strong oral language comprehension, so audiobooks can provide access to grade-level ideas and vocabulary. It is not a replacement for learning to read print. It is another pathway into the meaning that reading makes possible. 

An adult listening to a novel while driving, walking, gardening, or commuting is not thinking, “I am doing fake reading.” They are engaging with a story. They are imagining, interpreting, predicting, and feeling. The format changed; the relationship with the text did not disappear.

For students, the same respect matters. An audiobook can give a child access to worlds, characters, ideas, and vocabulary that might otherwise be locked behind a decoding barrier. At the same time, learning to decode print still matters because print itself offers unique opportunities for building fluency and independence.

Listening and reading are different pathways to meaning. They share some processes, but they place different demands on the brain. 

In this discussion, when researchers refer to reading, they are often referring specifically to reading print, which includes the additional task of decoding. The broader experience of engaging with a book, however, can happen through more than one pathway. 

Where the brain meets the meaning 

Once words are recognized, whether they arrive through speech or print, what happens next turns out to be remarkably similar.  In 2019, neuroscientists at UC Berkeley had adults listen to and read the same set of stories during fMRI scanning, then built detailed maps of which brain regions responded to which categories of meaning: people, places, numbers, emotion, and so on. The maps were highly similar across modality, leading the researchers to conclude that the brain’s representation of meaning is largely independent of whether it arrived through the eyes or the ears. (2)

A study of children ages 4 to 12 found something similar, with an important wrinkle. Berl and colleagues used fMRI while children listened to and read age-matched passages and found that both activities engaged overlapping brain networks involved in language comprehension. (3) Reading, however, also recruited additional areas beyond this shared network, which the researchers attributed to the added cognitive demands of decoding for children who were still developing automatic word recognition. 

For adults with fully developed reading skills, reading and listening rely on many of the same language processes. For children still building that skill, reading requires an additional layer of work because they are managing both decoding and comprehension at the same time. An audiobook changes the task by removing that particular demand. 

The difference is not that listening is a shortcut or that reading is superior. The difference is that the brain is handling different tasks. For an adult fluent reader, decoding has become so automatic that it almost disappears from awareness. For a beginning reader or a struggling reader, decoding is still taking cognitive resources. 

The question is not whether the formats are identical. They are not. The question is whether they provide meaningful access to language, ideas, and understanding. 

What comprehension studies reveal 

Neuroimaging tells you where the brain lights up; it does not tell you how well someone understood the material. Rogowsky, Calhoun, and Tallal randomly assigned adults to read an e-text, listen to an audiobook, or do both at once, then tested comprehension immediately and again two weeks later. No statistically significant differences turned up between any of the three conditions, at either time point.(4)

A 2022 meta-analysis by Virginia Clinton-Lisell pulled together 46 studies and nearly 4,700 participants and found the same thing at scale: the overall difference between reading and listening comprehension was essentially zero. (5) Across the studies included in the analysis, participants generally demonstrated similar levels of comprehension whether they read the print or listened to the material. 

However, that overall finding becomes more complicated when we look at the conditions under which the print reading and listening occurred. 

Two factors helped explain the differences. The first was pacing. When participants could control their own pace while reading print, they had a small advantage over listening because they could slow down, reread, or spend more time with difficult sections. When print reading was instead matched to a fixed pace, that advantage disappeared, and listening performed slightly better. 

The second factor was the type of comprehension being measured. When the questions focused on literal comprehension, such as recalling facts or details stated directly in the text, reading and listening produced nearly the same results. The difference became larger when the task required inferential comprehension, such as connecting ideas, drawing conclusions, or making meaning beyond the words themselves. In those situations, print-based reading showed a stronger advantage, likely because the reader could control the pace and return to specific parts of the text. 

When decoding is the barrier: dyslexia and audio 

This is a question most often settled by assumption rather than evidence, and it

deserves a real answer. Two recent studies, both published in Annals of Dyslexia, are directly relevant.

Keelor and colleagues gave students ages 8 to 12 with diagnosed reading and language difficulties the same passages under five conditions: silent reading, reading aloud, listening only, text-to-speech without word highlighting, and text-to-speech with highlighting. The text-to-speech condition, in which participants heard the words while simultaneously seeing them on the page, produced significantly higher comprehension scores than silent reading alone. Adding visual highlighting to the text-to-speech experience did not produce any additional gain. For this population, the advantage came specifically from combining auditory and visual access to the text, not simply from listening in isolation. 

The second study is a needed complication. Georgiou and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 76 studies comparing students with dyslexia to their typically developing peers. Unsurprisingly, students with dyslexia showed a large reading comprehension deficit compared to age-matched peers. Less expected was that they also showed a significant, moderate deficit in listening comprehension itself, compared to those same peers. (6)

This finding matters because, for a meaningful share of students with dyslexia, the difficulty is not purely a decoding problem that audio neatly solves. Some of the comprehension gap travels with the student into the audio condition too, which tracks with what the Reading Rope would predict: word recognition is only one braided strand, and dyslexia does not always leave the other one untouched.

The practical takeaway is not that audiobooks do not work for dyslexic readers. Audio, especially when paired with visible text, is a well-supported tool.  The more useful question is whether a particular student’s difficulty is primarily related to decoding or whether other language comprehension factors are also involved. That distinction matters because it shapes how much support a single format alone can provide. 

The overlooked factor: attention 

In a 2013 study, Varao Sousa, Carriere, and Smilek had participants read a passage aloud, read it silently, or listen to it read aloud, and periodically probed whether their mind had wandered. Listening produced the most mind-wandering of the three conditions; reading aloud produced the least. Mind-wandering, unsurprisingly, was negatively associated with both memory for the material and interest in it.(7)

This does not mean listening is inferior. The comprehension studies above found no overall gap between the two formats. Listening appears to place a heavier burden on sustained, self-generated attention because the listener has fewer external cues for regulating engagement with the text.  There is no physical act of engagement, such as eye movements, page-turning, or the small motor process of tracking print, anchoring the listener to the task in the same way it does for text reading.

A listener half-attending while doing three other things is having a very different learning experience from someone fully engaged with an audiobook. The same is true for a print reader. People skim, reread without processing, and lose focus while looking at a written page too. Attention is not a problem created by one format; it is a condition that shapes learning in any format.  

What this means for learners 

None of this supports “audiobooks don’t count,” and none of it supports “they’re interchangeable” either. What it supports is something more specific, and more useful.

For educators and parents: listening, and especially listening paired with visible text, is a legitimate and well-evidenced route to comprehension for children whose language comprehension outpaces their decoding. This description fits many students with dyslexia, English learners building academic vocabulary, and younger readers developing foundational skills. It is not a universal fix.  For students whose difficulty extends into listening comprehension as well, format alone will not resolve the challenge.  Knowing the source of the difficulty matters before treating audio as a complete solution.  

For dense or inference-heavy material, giving the reader or listener control over pace through pausing, rewinding, and rereading may matter more than the format itself. 

And for anyone who reaches for an audiobook because it fits into a commute, a workout, or a set of eyes that are tired by evening, the research gives you real standing to stop apologizing for it. Listening can be a meaningful way to engage with a book. What is worth managing is attention. An audiobook played during a fully attended, single-task listening session is a different experience from one played during a stretch filled with competing demands.  Comprehension is not the compromise. 

The question of whether audio “counts” turns out to be much less interesting than the questions that come after it. Who is the learner? What is the purpose? What does this person need from the text at this moment?

The format changes the work the brain has to do, but it does not determine the value of the experience. A child accessing ideas that decoding has not yet unlocked, an adult listening during a commute, or a reader returning to a familiar story in a new format are all engaging with language, meaning, and imagination.

The better question is not whether listening counts. It is whether the format supports the reader, the learner, or the listener in doing what books have always asked us to do: understand, imagine, question, and connect.

References:

1 Ipsos poll conducted for NPR (2025). Reported in A. Limbong, “Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?” NPR, July 2025.

2Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722–7736.

3Berl, M. M., Duke, E. S., Mayo, J., Rosenberger, L. R., Moore, E. N., VanMeter, J., Ratner, N. B., Vaidya, C. J., & Gaillard, W. D. (2010). Functional anatomy of listening and reading comprehension during development. Brain and Language, 114(2), 115–125.

4.Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2016). Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension. SAGE Open, 6(3).

5Clinton-Lisell, V. (2022). Listening ears or reading eyes: A meta-analysis of reading and listening comprehension comparisons. Review of Educational Research, 92(4), 543–582.

6Georgiou, G. K., Martinez, D., Vieira, A. P. A., et al. (2022). A meta-analytic review of comprehension deficits in students with dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 72, 204–248.

7Varao Sousa, T. L., Carriere, J. S. A., & Smilek, D. (2013). The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 892.

Winnie O'Leary August 2026

Winifred O’Leary is an educator, learning strategist, and curriculum leader with more than 30 years of experience supporting teachers, students, and organizations in creating meaningful learning experiences. Her work has focused on professional learning, curriculum design, implementation, and the thoughtful use of technology to improve teaching and learning. Throughout her career, she has partnered with educators and districts to turn research into practice and build systems that support continuous growth.