quote:Originally posted by Kwea: While there are similarities in the way the brain functions while doing both, they are not the same. Reading has a completely different skill set, and they are not the same thing at all.
Are you making this claim because it cannot be proved otherwise, or because you think there is a relevant difference between the two things when it comes to absorbing someone's writing?
I see the skill set as being very similar. You listen to words being read, you process the words, you understand what is being said, and you take away from that what you will. Or you look at words on a page and do the same thing. Perhaps in reading you create the sounds or the impression of tone in your mind, but what stops you from forming the same reactions through listening? One could argue that the voice of a particular reader is not dissimilar to the typeface of a particular novel- it does have an effect on your experience, but who can say that any particular effect is better or worse, or which really matters?
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you have no evidence that the process involved is very different at all. And even if it is more than a slight difference, it would be difficult to value one type of experience over another. It's perfectly plausible that human beings are better suited to listening than they are to reading- after all, we've been doing it a lot longer as a species. You can point out all the things that an audiobook adds to the experience, but it becomes very murky when you make claims about what it might take away. For some people, and this is a subjective thing, it might not take anything away.
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I don't like audiobooks. For me the experience is not the same at all. I twitch a little when people refer to listening to an audiobook as reading.
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Here's where I'm having trouble: Why is it so important to some of you that people distinguish between reading text and listening to text?
Let's say we were to have a discussion of "Ender's Game" (which would be appropriate on this site). Is my take on Ender's experience at Battle School somehow tainted by the fact that I have only ever "read" this book on tape (twice, as a matter of fact)? If you were to ask me, "Have you read 'Ender's Game?'" should I reply, "No, I listened to it on tape?" Would there be something wrong with giving a more simple, "Yes" in order to indicate that I have, through whatever means I chose, digested and understood the text of the novel?
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Porter, you of all people I'd expect to be on my side. It bothers me a tiny bit that you might really think I have some need to make others feel ashamed. I don't. What I have is an obsessive/compulsive need to call things by their proper names. You read with your eyes, not your ears. You listen with your ears.
I listened to Pride and Prejudice.Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:What I have is an obsessive/compulsive need to call things by their proper names.
So, Icarus, by that logic, you wouldn't say you "watched" a movie... but instead that you "watched and listened to" a movie? If there were subtitles, did you "watch, read, and listen to" the movie?
How about a concert? Do you say you "watch" a concert, "listen to" a concert, "went to" a concert? None of these fully describes the experience, really.
And, if you read with your eyes only, is it then impossible to "read" braille? If someone can use their sense of touch to read, it stands to reason that they can use their sense of hearing.
I think it comes down to different definitions of "read". If someone were to "learn to read"... that necessarily requires the printed word. Similarly if they were to "learn to read braille" it would require braille characters.
What about someone saying "read the following passage out loud". You're not really reading it out loud, you're reading it and then speaking it. The word "read" in that sense becomes "translate the information to speech" rather than simply "process the characters with your eyes".
If someone has listened to hundreds of classic books on tape... would they be considered "well read" or "well listened"?
I think the word "read" is very often used in the sense of "have you experienced the words written by the author" or "have you processed the story told by the author". If someone has experienced Ender's Game as ink-on-page, words-on-screen, braille-on-page, or spoken-word, I consider them having "read" the book.
There are plenty of other expansions to the word "read", too... such as "read someone's intentions", "read a situation", "read into someone's actions", etc. All of those imply gathering of information without necessarily having to involve the printed word.
Narrow definitions seem so restrictive as to lose the wondeful fluidity of language.
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quote:Porter, you of all people I'd expect to be on my side. It bothers me a tiny bit that you might really think I have some need to make others feel ashamed. I don't. What I have is an obsessive/compulsive need to call things by their proper names. You read with your eyes, not your ears. You listen with your ears.
While it wasn't visibly so, apparently, rest assured that my tongue was firmly in cheek when I said that.
I get what you're saying about calling things by their proper names. The problem, however, is that in many (for me, most) cases, what people are talking about when they talk about reading a book is not the act of reading, but of consuming.
When I ask you if you've read Dune, I really don't care if you read it in dead tree, eBook, or audio book, because it doesn't make any difference in the conversations I'd like to have with you about it.
I do care whether you've read the book or seen the movie, though, because they're just not the same story.
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That's an insulting comparison and I can't believe you even brought it up. Watching a movie is not the same thing as reading the book upon which the movie was based. A screenplay adaptation of a novel is necessarily different, whether in large or small ways. In fact, when there is both a movie and book form of a story, you can discuss, among other things, how true the adaptation was to the book.
An audiobook is the text of the novel, WORD FOR WORD.
Comparing watching a movie to listening to a book on tape implies (to me) that you view listening to be an inferior experience or to create an inferior understanding of the literature in question.
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quote:Comparing watching a movie to listening to a book on tape implies (to me) that you view listening to be an inferior experience or to create an inferior understanding of the literature in question.
Joe and I have had this conversation before, and I think he really does believe that, or something like it. IIRC, his reasoning involved the fact that visually reading involves both the visual and auditory parts of the brain, while listening doesn't.
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quote:Comparing watching a movie to listening to a book on tape implies (to me) that you view listening to be an inferior experience or to create an inferior understanding of the literature in question.
Joe and I have had this conversation before, and I think he really does believe that, or something like it. IIRC, his reasoning involved the fact that visually reading involves both the visual and auditory parts of the brain, while listening doesn't.
If this is the case, then his reasoning is flawed. In fact, I spent some time in graduate school studying learning through the senses and the various learning styles. There are 4: kinesthetic, auditory, visual/verbal, and visual/non-verbal. None of these are superior to the others; they are a matter of personal disposition. Someone with an auditory preference to learning, likes to hear things spoken out loud. Visual/verbal likes to see things in print. Visual/non-verbal likes to see visual representations of things (charts, graphs, pictures).
Studies have shown that gathering information through more than one sense adds to the learning (regardless of individual learning style), but reading text only involves the eyes, despite the auditory interpretation within the brain. It is the external stimulation through more than one sense that actually improves the experience. So, for example, a picture, a sound, a voice-over...
When text is presented visually and then read verbally, it does not improve learning. Neither the other way around.
When you account for differences in learning styles, however, those prone to auditory learning will prefer the material read out loud and those prone to the visual/verbal method will prefer the print.
Edited: Don't want to distract from the point and it was poorly phrased.
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I think we should avoid accusations of arrogance at least until Joe's had a chance to to speak for himself, not from hearsay from me.
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I'm following this debate with interest. And, I have been searching myself to see if I can identify any personal difference in using the audio verses the hard copy. I have found one that is major for a reader my age. When I fall asleep, the printed copy stops and waits. The tape just keeps playing.
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quote:Originally posted by Artemisia Tridentata: I'm following this debate with interest. And, I have been searching myself to see if I can identify any personal difference in using the audio verses the hard copy. I have found one that is major for a reader my age. When I fall asleep, the printed copy stops and waits. The tape just keeps playing.
LOL...been there, done that! Luckily, there's a rewind button.
An even bigger difference, though, is that with text it is easy to flip back a page if you can't quite remember what so-and-so's name is or go back to chapter 1 to remind yourself of something that happened there. This is so difficult in an audiobook that I have almost never done it. Usually, it doesn't matter. However, I have had to go back and re-read all or part of a book in the past.
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The printed copy does stop and wait, but then it is far easier to lose one's place in a book than with a cassette. The cassette always starts exactly where one leaves off.
Alternately, with CDs, it is very easy to lose one's place if the CD is ejected. You have to remember the section and time mark, just as you'd have to remember a page in a book. Though there aren't bookmarks to aid in this.
Going back to reread or search for something is more difficult in an audiobook format, true, which is I'm sure why audioencylcopedias aren't exactly common. But audiobooks do allow you to use your eyes for something else (such as driving, jogging or doing mindless chores) without having to stop reading.
One negative of audiobooks for me is that I read the printed word a lot faster than it can be read aloud. So a book that I could read in 5 hours of sitting could take 10-15 hours in audiobook format. But since it's easier to find 10-15 hours in my commute than it is to find 5 hours to sit with a book at the moment, I end up finishing faster anyway.
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quote:It is worth noting that the activity associated with listening to a person speak and the activity associated with reading is very similar - in both cases, the temporal lobe (especially on the left side in right-handed people) and the frontal lobe are active processing sounds and meaning, respectively. It is only the addition of the activity in the occipital lobe that separates reading text from listening to speech, and this is consistent with research on the cognitive processes involved in reading. Evidence suggests that, in order to be able to read, children must be able to decode text, translating it into a speech form, and children must also be able to understand spoken language.
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I can read much faster also. But, when I do, I don't need "Style". (what ever that is) For example, I just finished a book on the Pullman Strike. It was very poorly written. But, I enjoyed it, as it had a plethora of information that I wanted to know. Tapes, on the other hand, let me experience the words and the sentences as well as the information. The pullman strike would have left me hanging by my seat belt from the top of a Piņon.
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quote:Originally posted by Christine: An even bigger difference, though, is that with text it is easy to flip back a page if you can't quite remember what so-and-so's name is or go back to chapter 1 to remind yourself of something that happened there. This is so difficult in an audiobook that I have almost never done it. Usually, it doesn't matter. However, I have had to go back and re-read all or part of a book in the past.
Audible.com's downloads split the book into a number of parts, sometimes up to 6 or 8 (like War and Peace), each part being about 6 hours. The parts are further divided into chapters or other convenient divisions which allow you to skip through on your ipod, coming to major section breaks. Now, they've also added a chapter menu for the ipod, so you can look through the chapters and find your place, or just click "resume," and the audiobook will return to wherever you left off, because your ipod keeps track of where you are in a book, even if you haven't listened in a while.
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That still doesn't help with the situation she is describing. It's not uncommon for me to find myself thinking "Wait -- who is it that's talking here?" If I were reading a dead tree book, I'd just flip back and skim until I found the name. With an audio book, I either force through it, hoping I'll figure out, or I have to go back to the beginning of a section. Either way, it's a lot less convenient than a dead tree book.
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Any particular reason you keep saying "dead tree" instead of "paper"? There's some rag content too, you know. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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mph, I have had times where I've lost track of who is talking - especially with not-the-best readers who don't change their inflection much between characters (or who aren't consistent in their inflection for certain characters). In these cases, I just rewind a bit - generally it's only a couple lines back when you get a key to who's talking.
Then again, if you're reading Jane Austen, it could be like a two page monologue... so ymmv.
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More proof that Jane Austen isn't all she's cracked up to be. I think great authors lend themselves to audiobooks.
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