Is Listening to an Audiobook as Good as Reading?

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When was the last time you read a book? If you're like many Americans, the honest answer is, not recently. A new NPR/Ipsos poll of more than 2,000 adults found that only 51% had read a book in the past month; 40% of Americans say reading is low on their list of priorities. The most common reason: simply not having enough time.

Americans are increasingly filling this gap with audiobooks. According to the poll, 1 in 6 listened to an audiobook in the past month. But audiobooks come with some cultural baggage, as 40% of Americans — readers and non-readers alike — said that listening to an audiobook is not a form of reading.

But what does the research say?

It turns out, it depends who you ask

In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, UC Berkeley neuroscientist Fatma Deniz used functional MRI to scan the brains of nine volunteers as they listened to and read the same stories from “The Moth Radio Hour,” then compared participants’ brain activity for both. They found the brain maps from both activities to be virtually identical. The brain's semantic processing — how we extract meaning from words — is nearly the same regardless of whether we read a book or listen to it.

Since then, more research has confirmed these findings. A 2024 study published in Communications Biology analyzed fMRI data recorded while participants read and listened to the same narratives. The study verified that different regions of the brain specialize in interpreting information of varying durations, from single words to entire stories. Whether they were reading or listening to the information, participants used the same areas of their brains for processing.

Although these studies make a strong case that the brain processes reading and listening to books in the same way, there is more that comes into play, according to Robert Sternberg, a leading developmental psychologist at Cornell University. “Reading books is an activity that, over time, builds one's cognitive skills; it is not so clear that listening does the same,” he says.

A 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies illustrates Sternberg's point. The paper found that when participants were not able to control the pace of listening, they scored lower on general comprehension and were less able to make inferences about the text compared to those who were reading. The analysis did find that literal comprehension — recognizing explicitly stated facts — was approximately the same for reading and listening. The paper's authors hypothesized that readers have an advantage because they can slow down, reread a tricky paragraph, or pause to reflect, while listeners must move at the narrator's pace.

Pacing, re-reading, and the visual clues of written words are important components of reading a book, Sternberg explains. When listening to a book, you may have no idea what a new word looks like and how it’s spelled—and it’s more difficult to go back to a passage that you found important.

“When we read a word whose meaning we don't know, even if we are unaware of doing so, we are learning its meaning using context clues,” he says. “It is not clear that one can do such complex decoding by listening because the word comes and goes by so quickly.

“Second, in listening, you cannot remember that you saw it in a certain place on a certain page and then go back to it. You do have temporal context, but that tends to be quickly forgotten."

The systematic review also found that multitasking further complicates things. Most audiobook listening happens while doing something else: driving, exercising, cooking, etc. Divided attention consistently reduces how much we retain, which likely accounts for differences in comprehension when comparing reading and listening.

When to Listen Versus Read?

This body of evidence offers some useful insights on the best scenarios for listening to audiobooks versus reading.

Audiobooks are useful for:

• Leisure reading.
• Listening while commuting or exercising. (If you’re multitasking, be prepared to absorb less.)
• Books you might not read otherwise.

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Reading is best for:

• Material for which you want to retain details.
• Complex texts that require a slower pace or re-reading sections.

The evidence doesn’t suggest we should avoid audiobooks altogether, but rather that we should make careful choices about when to listen and when to read. “Audiobooks come at a cognitive price and one should not substitute them for reading,” Sternberg says.

The take-home message: Although the human brain interprets reading and listening in similar ways, the evidence shows that listening likely does not promote cognitive development as much as reading.

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