[Editor’s note: This is part three of a three-part series examining the development of a font touted to help struggling readers.]
Studies conducted over the years have shown that reading text out loud improves memory recall compared to reading silently. The question is, does the positive effect on recall also extend to understanding the material at a deeper level? Previous research determined that strategies like self-quizzing, spaced repetition, and detailed self-explanation improve learning outcomes. However, these all require a significant investment of time.
Reading aloud, though, has emerged as a potential alternative. Its use as a study strategy dates back to early 20th-century research, which suggested that vocalizing the material could aid in memorization, a phenomenon later termed the “production effect.”
The problem is, while the production effect’s influence on memory is well-documented, its impact on deeper comprehension remains unclear, highlighting a gap in our understanding of vocalization’s effects.
Lead study author Brady R. T. Roberts, who conducted the research as a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, says that “… research tended to define certain types of ‘comprehension’ much in the same way we would define rote memorization in the field of psychology.”[1]
To test whether vocalization does or does not affect comprehension, the team set up a series of four experiments.
Experiment 1
The participant pool included 47 university students from the University of Waterloo, who were given 10 short passages from the Nelson-Denny Reading Test; they were instructed to read some of these aloud and others silently in a randomized order to control for potential order effects. This meant that each participant acted as their own control. Once they completed the readings, the participants answered multiple-choice questions that assessed both memory and comprehension.
Memory-focused questions tested the participants’ ability to recall specific details mentioned in the text, while comprehension-focused questions forced participants to engage with “softer” elements, like the theme or tone of the passage, the basic topic, and the inferences that could be drawn from the text.
Experiment 2
This experiment expanded on the initial results by including another condition: reading text silently in a specific but unusual font, Sans Forgetica, which has been hypothesized to create a “desirable difficulty” that enhances memory and comprehension [see our posts about the font here and here]. This experiment included 114 individuals recruited through the MTurk platform and Flinders University’s online research participation system.
The final pool consisted of 64 participants, and the methodology was the same as Experiment 1 in terms of the reading and testing process. However, this experiment included text printed in the Sans Forgetica font to test whether visual degradation of letters and words could enhance memory recall and especially comprehension, which was found in research conducted by the font’s creators at RMIT University.
Experiment 3
This experiment included a larger and more diverse participant pool: 167 participants recruited through the Prolific online recruitment system. The study maintained the original design of randomized vocalized and silent reading passages, but the researchers enhanced the data quality controls, including more stringent criteria both for participation and for data inclusion.
This experiment also explored participants’ sense of the efficacy of reading aloud versus silently.
Experiment 4
This time around, the researchers wanted to 1) generalize the findings to different materials, and 2) examine the effects on comprehension more closely. They used new reading passages from the Test Prep Review website that were all chosen for their educational relevance and the comprehension-focused questions they contained.
Also conducted with 167 participants recruited via Prolific, the methodology resembled Experiment 3, but it included adaptations to ensure the new materials were comparable in content and difficulty to what was used in the previous experiments. The final analysis used data from 131 participants and focused only on comprehension to determine if vocalization could or could not enhance understanding beyond memory recall.
The outcome
Across all the experiments, the researchers found that reading aloud significantly improved memory for the material used over reading silently. This aligns with the concept of the production effect and suggests that vocalizing enhances materials’ memorability.
Now comes the however.
However, when they looked at comprehension, the researchers found something quite different. Despite the clear benefits for memory recall, reading aloud didn’t provide any significant advantage for deeper understanding of the material. The comprehension-focused questions produced similar accuracy rates irrespective of whether the passages were read aloud or silently.
This finding indicates that, while vocalization makes certain details of the text more memorable to the reader, it doesn’t inherently improve the reader’s ability to grasp underlying concepts or draw connections between different pieces of information.
These studies were performed primarily in a controlled environment, which leaves a lot of room to explore how these findings translate to real-world learning scenarios, including both classrooms and self-study sessions.
Citation:
[1] Dolan, Eric W. (March 7, 2024). “Reading aloud boosts memory, but not understanding.” Memory & Cognition. Retrieved from https://www.psypost.org/reading-aloud-boosts-memory-but-not-understanding/.
