Auditory Learning

Auditory learning is a style of learning where individuals primarily use their sense of hearing to absorb and process information. This approach emphasizes listening as a key method for understanding concepts and retaining knowledge. Auditory learners often benefit from verbal instructions, discussions, and audio resources, such as lectures and podcasts. They tend to excel in environments where spoken communication is prevalent and might struggle with traditional reading or writing tasks. Effective techniques for auditory learners include repeating information aloud, engaging in group discussions, and utilizing mnemonic devices that incorporate sound. This learning style highlights the importance of sound in education and acknowledges that people absorb information in diverse ways. Understanding auditory learning can enhance teaching methods and learning experiences, catering to varying preferences and promoting inclusivity in educational settings.

Published in: 2021

By: Meredith Eliassen, MSLIS

Subject Terms

Auditory Learning

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Auditory learners are believed to make up about 30 percent of the population. For auditory learners, hearing/speaking is the primary means of acquiring knowledge. Auditory learners may have difficulty with textual or visual instructions, though visual information sources can be improved for auditory learners with suitable imagery and logical writing. Auditory learners also utilize listening and repeating skills to sort through the information received, and they tend to recruit information from diverse sources based on whether they fundamentally trust the sources.

Overview

Sounds like singing emitted by all kinds of animals serve many purposes; the primary language system for human beings is auditory. Some animals, such as bats or dolphins, utilize sound as their primary source of information in connection to spatial ability in order to fly or swim freely. Whereas, humans utilize language to communicate. Teaching occurs by talking, and learning occurs through listening.

Many forms of knowledge come only by means of language semantics, diverse cultural stimuli, and different areas of learning, such as fictional, mythological, and religious wisdom. Auditory learners are attuned to discern meanings of words by listening to audible signals, such as changes in tone. For example, when memorizing a license plate number, an auditory learner may utter it out loud in order to remember how it sounded as a means of recalling it.

Studies have examined how auditory learning influences the process of development in humans. Recognition and identification, localization, discrimination, and sequencing of sounds are needed for person-to-person communications and for achieving long-term auditory memory. Stockholm University conducted a study in which adults, after completing arduous mathematical exercises, were exposed to sounds of nature and noisy environments. Researchers found that the participants recovered their calm faster with the natural sounds (Alvarsson, Wiens & Nilsson, 2010). A group of neuroscientists studied rats to measure responses to moderately loud noise that lasted over an hour and found that the stimulus altered how the brain processed information. Loud sirens and urban noise pollution can put humans into a continual state of arousal, or fight-or-flight response, where they can no longer focus on what is immediately happening in front of them (Frick & Young, 2012).

Young children learn from the testimony of people most familiar to them, usually parents and caregivers. Auditory learning demands environments that provide reliable sources of information. Auditory learning that incorporates role-playing projects directly enhances social skills: Children learn how to negotiate taking turns, assert needs, and practice creating and following rules.

Auditory learning creates environments where students can have exchanges with many primary information sources to enhance learning through listening. Teachers sometimes employ specific techniques, including verbal direction, group discussions and activities, verbal reinforcement, reading aloud, and putting information into a rhythmic pattern such as a rap, poetry, or songs.

The Auditory Learner. Auditory learners tend to be sensitive to consensus; they retain memories from past conversations or stories; they can be good debaters, paying attention to how many people will make one claim versus another. Auditory learners may read slowly and feel challenged when reading complicated graphs, maps, or diagrams.

Auditory learning enables students to take in information heard in intelligent and thoughtful ways and to utilize stimuli to create new tools, techniques, stories, and explanations. Auditory learners are good at writing responses to lectures they’ve heard, and they tend to be good storytellers. They can solve problems by talking them through, and auditory learners sometimes move their lips or talk to themselves to help accomplish tasks. Auditory learners enjoy reading aloud, are comfortable speaking in class and presenting oral reports, and they are good at oral exams. Not surprisingly, they often enjoy acting or performing on stage and can memorize information easily. They follow spoken instructions well, and they contribute well to study groups.

Media ecologist Walter J. Ong, distinguished orality by examining thought and its verbal expressions within illiterate populations. Ong illuminated a monumental shift from a world of sound to a world of vision that emerged with the printed word. According to Ong, scribing was not just an appendage to speech, it moved speech from an oral world into a new sensory world—that of vision— transforming speech and thought. Ong concluded that aides-memoire lead up to writing, but did not restructure human activity and thought as writing does (Ong, 2002). Even though the ancient media of speech and song were radically reconfigured with the introduction of the new medium of writing, they were never supplanted (Gopnik, 2016).

Interestingly, proponents of auditory learning assert that when an auditory learner reads, it is difficult for the learner to comprehend anything without sound in the background. In these situations, listening to music or having different sounds in the background (people talking or music) will help learners work better.

Further Insights

Auditory learners are very sensitive to questions being answered adequately. They will respond to inadequate answers with further questions or repeating the original question until satisfied. Auditory learning allows individuals seeking causal information that will allow them to hear explanations to understand the world in deeper and more meaningful ways that facilitate future learning.

Music and Development. Sensory integration is the ongoing process of taking in various stimuli detected by an individual’s senses, including sound, sight, temperature, balance, and gravity, and organizing this information for functional application during life experiences. Simply listening to sounds in nature like birds singing and smelling flowers while having outdoor experiences can bring about more organized brain, body, and sense integration that can in turn enhance and develop socio-emotional skills and cognitive abilities. When growing children are deprived of this kind of learning, they may struggle with more complex thinking, like developing and consolidating ideas, problem solving, and creative expression and imagination. Conversely, the absence of sound stimuli—quiet—can actually create opportunities or space to develop these areas subsequent to auditory stimuli.

Children can be challenged when developing audio discrimination of vowel sound that can impede reading and spelling abilities. Human music is analogous to acoustic signals produced by other species including birds, gibbons, and whales. Music in ritualized mother-infant verbal exchanges lends to shared-comprehension in human interactions that are shaped by common understanding. Ultrasounds show that a fetus at thirteen weeks reacts to music from outside the womb. Newborns that have not been conditioned have the human auditory apparatus that allows them to perceive some sounds and rhythms as a result of nature rather than culture. When a baby is born, he or she can quickly distinguish between the voice of a parent and that of a stranger. At five months, babies recognize melodies even when they have been transposed through comparison of notes and recognition of intervals. At six months babies begin to imitate spoken language and intonation.

A mother, holding her baby, instinctively sings lullabies that may only be a repetition of soothing syllables sung to a spontaneous tune, or a rhyme. Lullabies immerse young children into a richly diverse and ancient cultural heritage; many nursery rhymes can be traced to ballads, folk songs, war songs, street cries, and riddles, along with customs and rituals from oral traditions. Babies listen more attentively to a mother’s singing, or “motherese,” a sing-song language with repetitions, strong emotional content, and slow rhythms, and are able to remember tunes. Lullabies sung by parents and caregivers are songs where the tune is more important than the words.

Music carries emotion in a direct way whereas words do so indirectly; music connects people; it provides the means to foster social interactions and synchronized group actions within a variety of environments and rituals. Music is not an object of physical sustenance like food or water, or a protection against attackers, however it does serve a social function by fostering transient emotional encounters that can lead to deeper relationships. Singing can involve more people than can a conversation, sometimes bringing people who may not speak the same language together. Fine-grained auditory learning in the form of call and response can be more effective in teaching than picture books in establishing relationships and social bonding.

Coordinated social action is reflected in military call and response drills, inherited from prehistoric ancestors, which foster “muscular” bonding among men. These drills trigger the most elemental human emotions of love, hate, and fear. Likewise, movement in unison with cohesion or esprit de corps builds self-esteem. The movement of muscles in unison together with chants, song, or loud rhythmic yells creates euphoric energy among participants.

Discourse

Darwin asserted that human music, like language, could be studied as a biologically complex adaptation of evolution within nature to function as a courtship display to attract mates in sexual selection. Darwin argued that when male birds sing to females, it must be because the females are impressed, excited, or charmed by the display. Auditory learning utilizes play as part of social immersion. The common definition for play in this sense suggests taking on or pretending to be in an adult role. Young children are more credulous than older ones; they will give a speaker the benefit of the doubt when the speaker is confident even if the speakers’ testimony contradicts their actual experience. Stories enthrall children who listen; they learn about what is real and what is fictional or supernatural by listening to others.

Music and Rhythm in School. In primary education, auditory learning sometimes incorporates clapping games that developmentally follow finger games and singing games. Clapping rhyme games are often spontaneous with sequences and embellished rhymes that have been transmitted orally over the centuries. Some clapping games with clapping on the beat are derived from African call-and-response songs and require social interaction and concentration. Children start to learn the basic chants at about five years of age and develop more intricate rhythms from partners. Group jump-rope games are an offshoot of singing games.

Music and dance integrated into elementary education curriculum can bring elements of auditory learning to foster social bonding between boys and girls before puberty, and as the means for communal play and interaction. Music constitutes an element of shared human cognitive development; at six months of age, infants are capable listeners with specialized memory that respond to musical stimulus in synchronized ways. Rhythmic signals are capable of stimulating certain recurrent neural networks in human and mammalian brains. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and certain chord combinations play upon physical responsiveness of auditory systems to certain frequency relationships. Sound novelty that violates expectations while remaining harmonious becomes memorable, and music with lyrics (employing language and imagination) reaches deep into cognition.

Outdoor Education. Outdoor education can immerse auditory learners in environments that offer opportunities to engage with natural sound stimuli through restorative play and exploration that refines listening through repeated practice. For example, birding allows auditory learners to identify different bird sounds in order to identify specific species, and subsequently to mimic birdcalls with voice and hands. Outdoor education can also provide meaningful experiences that lay foundations for speech development and memory formation because learners are immersed and receive situational feedback that leads to deeper cognitive processing of information.

Learning Styles. German educator Frederich Froebel was a proponent of simple singing games in the kindergarten to “conquer crude materialism.” Froebel revolutionized early education in the nineteenth century when he demonstrated that young children were capable of rapid skill acquisition when they were allowed to use play media that exploited their affinity toward active play. In the 1980s, Neil Fleming, building on earlier scales developed by Kolb, Honey and Mumford, and Felder Silverman, proposed four learning modalities: visual, auditory, reading, and kinesthetic (VARK). According to this model, students vary in how effectively they receive and process information through watching, listening, reading, and touch and movement. Auditory learners are the students who profit from lectures and other auditory presentations. Many teaching methods have been developed in response to research on learning styles, encouraging educators to use multiple portals to classroom material. Önder & Silay (2015) demonstrated the importance of taking advantage of students’ learning styles to optimize instruction, measuring performance of control groups against groups of physics students in which each learning style was represented and students in each group assigned tasks that called on the student’s own learning style. Assessments showed significant improvement in the groups in which learning styles were taken into account, with auditory learners coming out ahead in the control groups. In other words, auditory learners showed a marked advantage in traditional physics instruction, while in teams with complementary learners all students benefited from the strengths of each member.

Terms & Concepts

Auditory Memory: As an individual develops, the capacity to store auditory symbols and experiences increases.

Conformity Effect: Developmental psychologists have found that individuals tend to change their thinking about what they observe if they hear enough testimony that contradicts what has been seen.

Discrimination: The auditory mechanism is developed to a functional point in utero, and by about six months of age, and individual can respond differentially to sounds in his/her environment.

Mother-infant affiliation: Children develop and share auditory codes significant to interactions needed for survival.

Repetition: A feature of ritualization when sounds are repeated over time and in multiple channels.

Ritualization: The evolutionary modification of sounds, movements, and structures to improve signals to optimally stimulate the perceptual systems of receivers.

Sequential Auditory Memory: An individual’s capacity to store auditory symbols and experiences demonstrated with word span increases.

Bibliography

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Alvarsson, J. J., Wiens, S., & Nilsson, M. E. (2010). Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(3): 1036–1046.

Frick, S. M. (2012). Listening with the whole body: Clinical concepts and treatment guidelines for therapeutic listening. Madison, WI: Vital Links.

Gelman, S. A., Leslie, S.-J., Was, A. M., & Koch, C. M. (2015). Children’s interpretation of general qualifiers, specific qualifiers, and generics. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 30(4), 448–61.

Gopnik, A. (2016). The gardner and the carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Halliday, L. L., Taylor, J. L., Millward, K. E., & Moore, D. R. (2012). Lack of generalization of auditory learning in typically developing children. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 55(1), 168–181. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=72014515&site=ehost-live

Hasibuan, M. S., Nugroho, L. S., Santosa, P. S., & Kusumawardani, S. S. (2016). A proposed model for detecting learning styles based on agent learning. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 11(10), 65–69. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=119119807&site=ehost-live

Önder, F., & Silay, İ. (2015). The importance of learning styles to form more successful cooperative groups in physics course. European Journal of Physics Education, 6(4), 1–11. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116583074&site=ehost-live

Ong, W, J. (2002). Orality and literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Psychology Press.

Reetzke, R., Maddox, W. T., & Chandrasekaran, B. B. (2016). The role of age and executive function in auditory category learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 142, 48–65. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=111295958&site=ehost-live

Auditory Learning

On this Page

Subject Terms

Auditory Learning

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Discourse

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading