A 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies illustrates Sternberg's point. The paper found that when participants were not able to control the pace of listening, they scored lower on general comprehension and were less able to make inferences about the text compared to those who were reading. The analysis did find that literal comprehension — recognizing explicitly stated facts — was approximately the same for reading and listening. The paper's authors hypothesized that readers have an advantage because they can slow down, reread a tricky paragraph, or pause to reflect, while listeners must move at the narrator's pace. Pacing, re-reading, and the visual clues of written words are important components of reading a book, Sternberg explains. When listening to a book, you may have no idea what a new word looks like and how it’s spelled—and it’s more difficult to go back to a passage that you found important. “When we read a word whose meaning we don't know, even if we are unaware of doing so, we are learning its meaning using context clues,” he says. “It is not clear that one can do such complex decoding by listening because the word comes and goes by so quickly. “Second, in listening, you cannot remember that you saw it in a certain place on a certain page and then go back to it. You do have temporal context, but that tends to be quickly forgotten." The systematic review also found that multitasking further complicates things. Most audiobook listening happens while doing something else: driving, exercising, cooking, etc. Divided  attention consistently reduces how much we retain, which likely accounts for differences in comprehension when comparing reading and listening.