Auditory and Visual Cognitive Styles and Adult Reading Performance

Abstract

College students performed match-to-sample tasks in the visual and auditory modalities. These tasks assessed reflective and impulsive cognitive styles. Cognitive style performance was related to achievement on a standardized test that measured Comprehension, Rate, Vocabulary, and Total reading achievement. Differential performance on several of these reading measures was a function of classification by auditory cognitive style, but not for visual style. Auditory assessment of cognitive style may have important implications for adults' as well as children's reading.