“37 percent of people say
they’ve listened to an audio book, and the medium continues to become an
important substitute for old-fashioned reading. Thanks in part to the ubiquity
of iPods other gadgets, audio books remain popular despite
turmoil in the publishing industry – experiencing a modest growth in sales in
past years.” According to Forbes magazine.
Prosody (in linguistics),
by definition is concerned with those elements of speech that are not
individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of
syllables and larger units of speech. These contribute to linguistic functions
such as intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm - e.g. “song
sung to music; tone or accent of a syllable.”
University of Memphis professor Arthur Graesser, who
studies learning and cognition said, that the type of book can also influence
how well the information gets absorbed. When the material is difficult, for
example, physical reading provides an advantage because the individual can
re-read and look to surrounding words for context clues.
According to Graesser, “the half-life for
listening is much longer than for reading because we are pre-conditioned to
listen to an entire conversation out of politeness. Generally, people keep
listening until there is a pause in an idea, but (especially in today’s
information-overload age), we stop reading at the slightest suggestion that
something more interesting might be going on elsewhere else.”
Questioning the academics - is listening to a book really just as good
as reading it?
Well that depends on the type of book. Philosophy professor
William Irwin in a 2009 essay, wrote that studies on electronic media
consumption are “woefully unaddressed by the academic community in general.” In
other words, research on this subject is pretty limited.
“Someone who knows the meaning can convey a lot
through prosody,” Willingham said. “If you’re listening to a poem, the prosody
might help you.”
Meanwhile, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has won Audible UK’s Member’s Choice Audiobook of the
Year Award for 2015.
Written by Xavier Rodrigues
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