Comment on Can you read and understand this passage?
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoI would want to repeat that study with novels written in the past 25 years before concluding too much. Yes, the participants had access to a dictionary, but I imagine that needing to decipher certain parts, such as foreign cultural references and familiar words with unexpected meanings, interferes with the brain’s usual functions for turning words into images in the mind’s eye. And this even ignores the folks wtih aphantasia like me.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There’s a discussion of the history context too:
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These were college students who were seeking English majors. People who are going to go on to teach Dickens - and hopefully have read Great Expectations or Tale of Two Cities at some point in high school.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Thanks for that. Indeed, that makes me less confident in their suitability to teach those subjects, but I worry about a sensational conclusion about their general literacy.