“Research has shown that people who listen to the narration of a passage, like the audio storytelling found in traditional audiobooks, remember less information, are less interested in the content, and are more likely to daydream than those who read the same book out loud or silently to themselves.”
See, for example, this previous post here: Your Brain On Audiobooks: Distracted, Forgetful, And Bore...
"But anyone who has gotten hooked on a [storytelling] podcast knows that audio can be much more than just narration.
Emma Rodero, a communications professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, studies how audio productions retain people’s attention. Her work has shown that a dramatized audio structure, using voice actors who tell the story exclusively through dialogue, stimulate listeners’ imagination more than a typical “voice of God” narration.
Participants who listened to the dramatized structure reported that they generated more vivid images in their minds, and conjured the images more quickly and easily than those in the narration condition."
"Audiobook producers are catching on, and have started rolling out new types of “audio entertainment.” A novel by best-selling crime writer Jeffrey Deaver, called The Starling Project, has only been released as an audiobook, and features characters brought to life by 29 voice actors. "
"like reading, listening to audio allows people to create their own versions of characters and scenes in the story. But she thinks listening, unlike looking at a written page, is more active, since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.
“Audio is one of the most intimate forms of media because you are constantly building your own images of the story in your mind …you’re creating your own production."
This gels with own experience-- the lingq “lessons” that I get the most feedback on are, invariably, the ones that tell a story - especially those with a number of people contributing to the dialog - for example here: Login - LingQ
I think “killer” content in language learning includes:
- audiobooks particularly dialog heavy stories with different characters, and
- chat podcasts or talk back radio (with transcripts) with people sharing personal stories.
If I was learning English, most of my lingq uploads would be content like the “Serial” podcast, along with its transcripts.