The problem addressed in this quantitative experimental study was that students were having more difficulty learning from audiovisual lessons than necessary because educators had eliminated textual references, based on early findings from CLT research. In more recent studies, CLT researchers estimated that long-term memory schemas may be used by individuals for learning without conscious efforts. This study was conducted with 162 volunteers from Virginia, including some anxiety sufferers with the purpose to measure through their performance in a quiz, the potential effects of reading and the correlations between performance and their levels of anxiety, as measured by the Hamilton Anxiety Test. Although all the students saw identical images but half of them were able to read as well as to hear descriptions in the lesson while the other half only heard the oral narrative. An ANCOVA was used to measure the statistical association between learner performance, written text, and learner's anxiety. The results of this study support the hypothesis that learners perform better when written text is added to audiovisual lessons in spite of its aparent burden. More than 70% of the participants performed better on the quiz when they attended the text enriched version of the lesson. This superiority suggests that added text facilitates automated learning. While interaction of general performance with anxiety levels was not statistically significant, participants scoring in the higher tiers of severe anxiety performed better, regardless of the version of the lesson attended. This accidental finding could be linked to automated mechanisms activated during emergencies. Further research and observation using reading and other potential automated cognitive functions to help learning, is recommended. Particular attention should be given to the impact of emergency cognitive functions on memory. Strongly recommended is research on early promotion of fluency and proficiency in reading and its continuous development. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]