Listening, Reading, or Both? Rethinking the Comprehension Benefits of Reading‐While‐Listening

Abstract

The rising popularity of audiobooks in language learning has highlighted the need to understand their potential benefits in enhancing comprehension and the mechanisms driving these effects. In this registered report, we explored the hypothesis that reading‐while‐listening can enhance lower‐level decoding skills, in turn freeing up cognitive resources to support comprehension. In a within‐participant design, eighty‐six intermediate‐to‐advanced Chinese learners of English read, read and listened, and listened to different excerpts of a novel. Contrary to our preregistered hypotheses, participants comprehended the text less well when reading‐while‐listening than when reading it silently. Both reading conditions yielded better comprehension than listening‐only. Individual differences in segmentation skills and orthographic decoding supported comprehension but did not interact with the input condition in the way that theory would predict. These results confirm the importance of orthographic decoding and speech segmentation for comprehension, but they also point to gaps in theoretical understanding of reading‐while‐listening's presumed pedagogical advantages for comprehension.