This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters do, which isn't true either. They had trouble then too, but (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.
Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.
* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?
* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?
* Does the reader know a
bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?
To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second.
It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.
An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to
better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.
They aren't. A run-on, 70 word sentence for example wasn't easier to store in your head, or not require the occasional second read-through back then . Readers then still had to go through all of that. This "it's just outdated" idea is employed primarily to hand-wave poor literacy performance and reading requirements.
Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or treat it like a foreign language. These are just books you have to read slower than a news article, and that's alright, but there's a fine line between needing more time and not being able to get through it. That study showed it conclusively.
Yes, he was popular, and his works still weren't as easy to read as some of his contemporaries and many authors before and after him. That's not nonsense, that's reality.
Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.