Are Audiobooks Good for Kids? What the Research Says

Yes, for most school-age children, as long as audiobooks are added to reading together and not used in place of it. Listening builds vocabulary and story understanding, and no study we found shows that it holds back learning to read. The gains are biggest when a child can see the words as they hear them, or when an adult listens and talks about the story with them. For babies and toddlers there is almost no direct research, and what exists points to a live voice mattering more than a recording.

The best recent evidence is a 2026 randomized trial with 314 third and fourth graders. Eight weeks of audiobooks with the words highlighted on screen taught them new words from the books. Children who also had one-to-one support with an adult gained about twice as much. A 2015 review of 43 studies with 2,147 children aged 3 to 10 found that narrated digital storybooks gave a small extra boost to story comprehension and vocabulary. Games and pop-ups inside the story pulled the other way.

Do audiobooks help kids learn to read?

They help with the part of reading that comes after decoding: understanding. In the widely used model of reading by Gough and Tunmer (1986), reading comprehension depends on two skills, decoding print and understanding language. A child in first or second grade usually understands far more by ear than they can read on their own. As decoding becomes automatic, how well a child understands spoken language explains more and more of how well they read, as Hogan, Adlof and Alonzo describe in a 2014 review. Audiobooks feed that second skill with books a child cannot yet decode.

The strongest trial so far is by Olson, Ozernov-Palchik, Arechiga and Gabrieli at MIT, published in Developmental Science in 2026. They randomly assigned 314 children in grades 3 and 4 to one of three groups for about eight weeks:

• Audiobooks only (105 children). About 90 minutes a week on the Learning Ally app, where "as the book is read aloud, the words are highlighted on the screen."
• Audiobooks plus support (108 children). The same, plus two 30-minute one-to-one sessions a week with an adult.
• A mindfulness program (101 children) as the comparison group.

Both audiobook groups learned more words from their books than the comparison group. The effect was small to moderate with audiobooks alone (d = 0.35 for using the words) and larger with support (d = 0.64 for recognizing them and 0.74 for using them). Two cautions: neither group improved on standardized vocabulary tests, and children who were already poor readers gained only when they had the one-to-one sessions.

So audiobooks are not a shortcut past reading practice. A 2023 meta-analysis by Virginia Clinton-Lisell pooled 30 studies with 1,945 participants and found only "a trivial overall benefit" of reading while listening over reading alone, and no reliable benefit when readers set their own pace. Listening adds access and vocabulary. Phonics and practice still teach decoding.

Do kids look at the words while they listen?

Not much, unless something draws their eyes there. In two eye-tracking studies published in Psychological Science in 2005, Evans and Saint-Aubin found that preschoolers sitting on a mother's or teacher's lap "spent very little time examining the print" of a storybook. They looked at the pictures. In a 2008 study of 44 preschoolers, Justice, Pullen and Pence found only about 5 to 6% of children's looks landed on the print during ordinary reading. When the adult pointed to the words or talked about them, that share rose significantly.

Highlighting does a similar job. In a 2020 study in Computers & Education, Liao and colleagues tracked the eyes of 61 children aged 4 and 5 using digital storybooks. With a plain layout, children spent a little over 19% of their time on the print. When each word lit up in sync with the narration, that rose to about 38%. After four weeks, both the highlighted version and an adult talking about the print improved the children's print awareness.

This is the catch with most audiobooks: the child hears the story but has nothing to read. An app that lights up each word as the narrator says it, such as HushBook, puts the print back in front of them while they listen.

Are audiobooks as good as reading to your child?

No, and the researchers who study this say so too. Reading together does things a recording cannot: you stop, point, ask questions and answer them.

• Talking about the book matters. A 2008 meta-analysis by Mol, Bus, de Jong and Smeets looked at 16 studies of dialogic reading, where the adult asks open questions and builds on the child's answers. Across 9 studies with 322 children, it boosted expressive vocabulary by about d = 0.59. The effect was smaller for 4 and 5 year olds and for children at risk.
• Well-made narrated stories can match plain reading on some outcomes. A 2014 meta-analysis by Takacs, Swart and Bus, covering 29 studies and 1,272 children aged 3 to 11, found no significant difference in comprehension or vocabulary between multimedia stories and sharing a print book with an adult. But only 14 of the studies had an adult reader in the comparison, just one used parents, and none measured motivation or the social side of reading together.
• Games and pop-ups get in the way. The same team's 2015 review of 43 studies found that animation, music and sound effects helped comprehension (g = 0.39), while interactive extras like hotspots and games were "distracting." For disadvantaged children the gap was larger.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' Q&A on audiobooks, updated in April 2026, puts it plainly: "audio narration is not a perfect substitute for parental co-reading." It advises parents to "avoid relying on audiobooks and audio players as a replacement for co-reading physical ones."

Are audiobooks good for toddlers and babies?

There is very little research on audiobooks for children under 3. The AAP notes that audio players like the Toniebox or the Yoto "haven't been studied" in younger children, though it adds that they "can provide children a positive, independent activity."

The closest evidence is a warning about recordings. In a 2003 study in PNAS, Patricia Kuhl and colleagues gave 9-month-old American babies 12 sessions with native Mandarin speakers, and the babies learned to tell Mandarin speech sounds apart. Babies who got the same material from audio or video recordings learned nothing: "exposure to recorded Mandarin, without interpersonal interaction, had no effect."

So for babies and young toddlers, the live voice is what teaches. A recorded story at bedtime or in the car is fine as a calm extra. The talking, singing and reading together are the part that counts.

Are audiobooks better than TV for kids?

Possibly, for following a story, but no modern trial has tested audiobooks against TV head to head.

The most direct evidence is small. Hutton and colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital scanned the brains of 27 children, average age almost 5, while they heard a story in three formats: audio only, illustrated and animated. In the 2019 paper, comprehension was the same for the audio and illustrated stories and lower for the animated one. In the 2020 paper, the language network worked hardest with audio only, which the authors read as strain, while pictures eased that strain and animation reduced how well brain networks worked together. It was one session, the formats came in the same order for every child, and the sample was small.

Screen guidance does not settle it either. The AAP's 2016 policy statement on media for children up to 5, "Media and Young Minds", reviews television, videos and mobile or interactive technologies. It does not address audio-only stories. The AAP's audiobook Q&A does call audiobooks and audio players "useful tools for a screen-free mental refocus."

What do kids themselves say?

UK surveys by the National Literacy Trust give a sense of how children use audiobooks, though they are self-reports, not experiments:

• 2020. Of 58,346 children aged 9 to 18 surveyed in early 2020, 16.3% listened to audiobooks. In a lockdown survey of 4,141 children aged 8 to 18, 23.4% said they were listening more than before. Among listeners, 52.9% said audiobooks had increased their interest in reading. The report was commissioned by the Publishers Association.
• 2024. In a survey of more than 37,000 children and young people aged 8 to 18 who listen to audio, 37.5% said listening had sparked their interest in reading books. More said they enjoyed listening in their free time (42.3%) than enjoyed reading (34.6%), the first time since the Trust began asking in 2020.

Children who listen also tend to enjoy reading more, but these surveys cannot show that one causes the other.

How to use audiobooks with kids

• Under 3. Read, talk and sing together first. Use recorded stories as quiet time, not as the main way your child meets books.
• Ages 3 to 6. Listen together when you can and ask about the story, as the AAP suggests. Choose narrated stories without games or pop-ups. Pick "high-quality, slow-paced content."
• Ages 6 to 10. Let your child follow the text while listening. Choose books a little above what they can read alone: class novels, series their friends love, non-fiction they are curious about. Car trips and bedtime are easy wins.
• Struggling readers. Audiobooks help them keep up with the stories their classmates read, but keep reading instruction going. The 2026 trial found poor readers gained only with adult support. See are audiobooks good for dyslexia and are audiobooks good for ADHD.
• Does it count as reading? For understanding a story, yes. If a teacher set a book to practise reading skills, ask first. More in does listening to an audiobook count as reading.
• Free sources. Your library's Libby or Hoopla apps and LibriVox's free public domain recordings cost nothing. Our guide to listening to audiobooks for free covers the options.

What the evidence does not show

• There are no long-term trials linking childhood audiobook use to later reading achievement.
• No study has tested audiobooks or audio players with children under 3. The infant research suggests recordings do not teach language the way people do.
• The benefits found are mostly small, and in the largest trial they did not carry over to standardized tests.
• The brain-scan work comes from one group of 27 children in a single session.
• The UK surveys are self-reports from children, many of whom already listen, so they show links, not causes.

Reading along with HushBook

Most audiobooks come without text. HushBook transcribes an audiobook on your phone and highlights each word as the narrator says it, so a child can read along instead of only listening. Long-press a line to play it again, and slow the narration down for a new reader. It has LibriVox and Internet Archive classics built in, including children's classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it works offline with no account.

HushBook is a reading aid to use alongside reading together and reading lessons, and younger kids get the most from it with you beside them. It works with audiobook files you own, such as MP3 and M4B, as well as the free classics built into the app.

Kids can also pick a reading companion in HushBook: one of 14 animals, each with its own reading habit, like a bear who "settles in for long books" or a fox who "guesses the ending". Their companion greets them on the Home screen, and choosing one is free.

Sources

• Olson, Ozernov-Palchik, Arechiga and Gabrieli (2026), "Remote Text-Supplemented Audiobook Intervention Supports Children's Explicit and Incidental Vocabulary Learning", Developmental Science
• Takacs, Swart and Bus (2015), "Benefits and Pitfalls of Multimedia and Interactive Features in Technology-Enhanced Storybooks: A Meta-Analysis", Review of Educational Research
• Takacs, Swart and Bus (2014), "Can the computer replace the adult for storybook reading? A meta-analysis on the effects of multimedia stories as compared to sharing print stories with an adult", Frontiers in Psychology
• Gough and Tunmer (1986), "Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability", Remedial and Special Education
• Hogan, Adlof and Alonzo (2014), "On the importance of listening comprehension", International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
• Clinton-Lisell (2023), "Does Reading While Listening to Text Improve Comprehension Compared to Reading Only? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis", Educational Research: Theory and Practice (ERIC EJ1403866)
• Evans and Saint-Aubin (2005), "What Children Are Looking at During Shared Storybook Reading: Evidence From Eye Movement Monitoring", Psychological Science
• Justice, Pullen and Pence (2008), "Influence of verbal and nonverbal references to print on preschoolers' visual attention to print during storybook reading", Developmental Psychology
• Liao, Chang, Huang and Sung (2020), "Electronic storybook design, kindergartners' visual attention, and print awareness: An eye-tracking investigation", Computers & Education
• Mol, Bus, de Jong and Smeets (2008), "Added Value of Dialogic Parent-Child Book Readings: A Meta-Analysis", Early Education and Development (ERIC EJ787378)
• Kuhl, Tsao and Liu (2003), "Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning", PNAS
• Hutton, Dudley, Horowitz-Kraus, DeWitt and Holland (2019), "Functional Connectivity of Attention, Visual, and Language Networks During Audio, Illustrated, and Animated Stories in Preschool-Age Children", Brain Connectivity
• Hutton, Dudley, Horowitz-Kraus, DeWitt and Holland (2020), "Differences in functional brain network connectivity during stories presented in audio, illustrated, and animated format in preschool-age children", Brain Imaging and Behavior
• American Academy of Pediatrics, Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, "Audiobooks, audio players and child development" (updated April 2026)
• American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2016), "Media and Young Minds", Pediatrics
• Best, Clark and Picton (2020), "Children, young people and audiobooks before and during lockdown", National Literacy Trust
• National Literacy Trust (2025), "Children and young people's listening in 2024"