Auditory Learning Style: Learning by Listening

What the auditory style describes

People who identify with the auditory style say they prefer to have things explained out loud: a well-told lecture, a conversation, a podcast, rather than a text or a diagram.

It is the A (for Aural) in the VARK model, the questionnaire Neil Fleming and Colleen Mills introduced in 1992 along with the visual, reading/writing and kinesthetic variants. Fleming himself framed it as a catalyst for reflecting on how one studies, not as a diagnosis.

That preference is real, and it is useful to know it. What research has not confirmed is the next step: that someone who prefers listening learns more when they study by listening. This article keeps the two apart.

If you want to see how your preference is spread across the four channels, you can take our learning style quiz. Most people combine traits from several, such as the visual or the kinesthetic style, in proportions that shift by subject.

How it usually shows up

People who score high on this style tend to describe similar experiences:

• They find it easier to follow a topic when someone explains it than when they read about it.
• They spontaneously repeat information out loud when they want to memorize it.
• They would rather prepare for an exam by talking it through with someone than in silence.

These are descriptions of what feels comfortable. The interesting question is whether that comfort translates into better results.

The test the meshing hypothesis has never passed

In 2008, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the literature on learning styles in a report for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They focused on the so-called meshing hypothesis: the idea that each person learns best when teaching is matched to their style.

To prove it, they explained, a very specific experiment is needed: classify students by style, randomly assign each group to different teaching methods, and test everyone with the same exam. The hypothesis would only hold if auditory learners did better with the auditory method and visual learners with the visual one, a crossover in the results. They found very few studies with that design, and the ones that existed did not show that crossover.

Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Calhoun and Paula Tallal later ran exactly that experiment for the auditory channel (2015). College-educated adults, some with an auditory preference and others with a visual preference for words, studied the same popular-science text either as an audiobook or in print. There was no relationship between preference and format: auditory learners did not understand better with the audiobook, on either the immediate or the delayed test.

What the voice does offer everyone

The fact that meshing doesn’t work does not make speaking and listening useless for studying. Two well-documented effects use the voice, and neither depends on a person’s style.

The production effect

Colin MacLeod and his team (2010) asked participants to read a list of words, some aloud and some silently. The spoken words were remembered better. They called it the production effect.

The key detail is that the effect showed up mainly when only part of the material was spoken: what is said aloud becomes distinctive and stands out against what was read silently. Reading everything aloud dilutes the advantage.

Noah Forrin and MacLeod (2018) refined the mechanism by comparing four conditions: saying the words aloud, hearing a recording of one’s own voice, hearing someone else, and reading silently. Recall dropped in that same order. Their conclusion is that the advantage combines two ingredients: the motor act of speaking and the experience of hearing oneself.

Explaining without looking

The second tool is retrieval practice. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) found that trying to recall a text led to better retention a week later than rereading it, even though rereading gave a stronger feeling of mastery.

Explaining a topic out loud, with no notes in front of you, is a form of retrieval: it forces you to pull what you learned out of memory and shows what is missing. In John Dunlosky and colleagues’ review (2013) of ten study techniques, retrieval practice and spaced review were the only two rated as having high utility.

An example using both tools

A student who sees herself as an auditory learner is preparing for an oral history exam. If her strategy is to listen to the lecture recording three times, she is working with a feeling of familiarity that research links to weak retention.

If instead she reads her notes silently and says only the key dates and concepts out loud, and at the end of each topic explains it to herself without looking, she is using the production effect and retrieval practice. Both would work just as well for a classmate who considers himself a visual learner.

Her auditory preference helps her choose what she finds enjoyable, and that matters: motivation also keeps studying going. What makes her remember is the kind of effort, not the channel.

Why spoken language has its own circuit

The experiments of neuroscientist Roger Sperry with patients whose corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres, had been cut showed something specific about language: when a word reached only the left hemisphere, the patient could read it and say it aloud; when it reached only the right, they could not name it, although they could often point to the object with the left hand.

That work, recognized with the 1981 Nobel Prize, confirmed that speech production depends on the left hemisphere in most people. It is the circuit that switches on when someone sums up out loud what they have just studied.

But having a specialized circuit for language is a feature shared by almost everyone, not a sign that some people learn better through their ears than others.

In short

• The auditory style describes a legitimate preference, which can guide which formats feel most enjoyable.
• The idea that studying in your preferred format improves learning has not been confirmed in experiments designed to test it.
• The voice does help anyone when used deliberately: say only the key points aloud, and explain without looking.

This article summarizes research on learning for informational purposes; it does not replace guidance from a professional if there are learning or hearing difficulties.

Sources

• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
• Fleming, N. D., & Mills, C. (1992). Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection. To Improve the Academy, 11, 137-155.
• Forrin, N. D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2018). This time it’s personal: The memory benefit of hearing oneself. Memory, 26(4), 574-579. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2017.1383434
• MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R., & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671-685. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018785
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
• Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(1), 64-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037478
• Sperry, R. W. (1982). Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral hemispheres. Science, 217(4566), 1223-1226.