Do we hear and read the same? Attention to detail in narrative storytelling while reading and listening with reduced distraction
Abstract
Most research agrees that reading and listening are equally efficient. But research on multimedia learning searched for modality specific processes that could improve learning efficiency, this is relevant considering the current panorama and worldwide usage of intelligent text-based agents. Our brief study compares the audio-verbal channel with the visual-verbal channel, facilitating exact wording identification after a reading or a listening task. We focus on comparing reading and listening overall performance, but also category specific performance by modality. Twenty-six native Spanish speakers read one text and listened to another one. Each text had five instances of each word category (color, feeling, object and person) and there were 3 questions per category. Each question framed 3 possible answers and the participants had to recognize which one was correct. We tested if the correct answers were recognized and whether abstract or concrete concepts or specific word categories affected encoding. We minimized distraction for both modalities and standardized the word rate, to avoid text backtracking. Results have shown that for non-demanding material, there isn't a significant difference in regard to input modality. Both reading and listening modalities are not effectively different, and processing of category-specific wording is not either.
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BibTeX
@misc{berga2026hear,
title = {{Do we hear and read the same? Attention to detail in narrative storytelling while reading and listening with reduced distraction}},
author = {David Berga and Benan Demir and Anita Dieckhoff and Monica Moreno-Dionis},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/c4hwj_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c4hwj_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Do we hear and read the same? Attention to detail in narrative storytelling while reading and listening with reduced distraction
AU - David Berga
AU - Benan Demir
AU - Anita Dieckhoff
AU - Monica Moreno-Dionis
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/c4hwj_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c4hwj_v1/
AB - Most research agrees that reading and listening are equally efficient. But research on multimedia learning searched for modality specific processes that could improve learning efficiency, this is relevant considering the current panorama and worldwide usage of intelligent text-based agents. Our brief study compares the audio-verbal channel with the visual-verbal channel, facilitating exact wording identification after a reading or a listening task. We focus on comparing reading and listening overall performance, but also category specific performance by modality. Twenty-six native Spanish speakers read one text and listened to another one. Each text had five instances of each word category (color, feeling, object and person) and there were 3 questions per category. Each question framed 3 possible answers and the participants had to recognize which one was correct. We tested if the correct answers were recognized and whether abstract or concrete concepts or specific word categories affected encoding. We minimized distraction for both modalities and standardized the word rate, to avoid text backtracking. Results have shown that for non-demanding material, there isn't a significant difference in regard to input modality. Both reading and listening modalities are not effectively different, and processing of category-specific wording is not either.
ER -