https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/922346
They were a sample of English majors and predominantly white. They were given dictionaries and online resources to look words or concepts up they couldn’t understand and were also allowed to use their phones.

Despite this the majority of them failed to comprehend the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, they thought for example there was a literal Megalosaurus wandering around the city or that the Lord High Chancellor was literally in a room with a mouse because they saw the word “whiskers”

What went wrong?