Let’s start with a mental experiment: close your eyes and imagine what the future will be like within a few hundred years.
Are we intergalactic travelers who move between galaxies? Perhaps we live in spacecraft, underwater worlds or planets with purple skies.
Now, imagine your bedroom as a teenager of the future. There is probably a bright screen on the wall. And when you look out the window, you may see Saturn’s rings, Neptune blue glow or the wonders of the ocean bottom.
Now ask yourself: Is there a book in the room?
Open your eyes. Most likely there is a book nearby. Maybe it is on your table at night or under the bed. Some people only have one; others have many.
You can still find books today, even in a world full of podcasts. Because? If we can listen almost anything, why is reading important?
As a language scientist, study how biological factors and social experiences mold language. My work explores how the brain processes spoken and written language, using tools such as magnetic resonance and electroencephalogram.
Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understand. However, these activities are not exactly the same. Each facilitates the understanding in different ways. Listening does not offer all the benefits of reading, and Read does not offer everything you hear. Both are important, but they are not interchangeable.
Different brain processes
Your brain uses some of the same linguistic and cognitive systems both to read and to listen, but also performs different functions according to how information assimated.
When you read, your brain works hard between racks. Recognize the forms of letters, relate them to speech sounds, connect those sounds with meaning and then link those meanings through words, sentences and even complete books. The text uses a visual structure such as punctuation marks, paragraph jumps or bold words to guide understanding. You can advance at your own pace.
Listening, on the other hand, requires that your brain work at the rhythm of the speaker. Because spoken language is fleeting, listeners must resort to cognitive processes, including memory, to retain what they just heard.
Speech is also a continuous flow, not perfectly separate words. When someone speaks, the sounds merger in a process called co -oticulation. This requires that the listener’s brain quickly identify the limits of the words and connect them with their meanings. In addition to identifying the words itself, the listener’s brain must also pay attention to the tone, identity of the speaker and the context to understand its meaning.
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‘Easier’ read or listen: both are relative and contextual
Many people assume that listening is easier than reading, but it is not usually like that. Research shows that listening may be more difficult than reading, especially when the material is complex or unknown.
Auditory and reader understanding are more similar in simple narratives, such as fiction stories, than in non -fiction books or essays that explain facts, ideas or how things work.
My research shows that the genre influences the way of reading. In fact, different types of texts depend on specialized brain networks. Fiction stories involve regions of the brain involved in social understanding and narration. Non -fiction texts, on the other hand, are based on a brain network that facilitates strategic thinking and attention aimed at objectives.
Reading difficult material is also easier than listening from a practical point of view. Read allows to navigate the text with ease, rereading specific sections if you have difficulty understanding or underlining important points to review them later.
A listener who has difficulty following a particular point must pause and rewind, which is less accurate to brow a page and can interrupt the listening flow, making understanding difficult.
Even so, for some people, such as those suffering from development dyslexia, listening can be easier. People with developmental dyslexia often have difficulty applying their knowledge of written language to the correct pronunciation of words, a process known as decoding. Listening allows the brain to extract meaning without the complex decoding process.
Interaction with material
A last aspect to consider is interaction. In this context, interaction refers to being mentally present, actively concentrating, processing information and connecting ideas with what is already known.
People usually listen while other things, such as exercising, cooking or navigating the Internet; Activities that would be difficult to do while reading.
When researchers asked university students to read or listen to a podcast in their free time, those who read the material obtained significantly better performance in a questionnaire than those who heard it.
Many of the students who listened reported several tasks at the same time, such as navigating on their computers while reproducing the podcast. This is particularly important, since paying attention seems to be more important for auditory understanding than for reading comprehension.
So, yes, reading is still important, even when listening is an option. Each activity offers something different and are not interchangeable.
The best way to learn is not to treat books and audio recordings as if they were the same, but to understand how each one works and use both to better understand the world.
*Stephanie N. Del Tufo She is an attached professor for Education and Human Development at the University of Delaware.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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