

I 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 with aphantasia like me.
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.