We use letters every day of our lives, but apparently there is one small letter that we don’t recognize.
Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have found that most people don’t know that there are two types of lowercase g.
One of these is the open tail ‘g’, which most of us would handwrite with an image comparable to a ‘snare with a fishing hook hanging from it’.
Then there’s the round tail ‘g’ which appears in printed form such as books and newspapers, as well as in Serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri – we’ve all seen this type of letter a million times, but we seem to remember that it’s quite different challenge.
There were 38 volunteers in the study published by Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Representation and they were asked to list letters that they thought had two variations in print.
In the first experiment, “most participants failed to recall the existence of the looptail g” while only two people couldwrite looptail g exactly.
“They don’t quite know what that letter looks like, even though they can read it,” co-author Gali Ellenbloom said.
Next participants were asked to look for examples of a looptail g in the text and were asked to reproduce this style of letter afterwards and eventually only one person could do this while half the group wrote an open tail g.
The multiple choice question asked to the participantsYouTube/Johns Hopkins University
Finally, the study participants were asked to identify the letter g in a multiple-choice test with four variations of the letter, where seven out of 25 were able to do so correctly.
So how can we know a letter but not recognize it?
This may be because we’re not taught to write that kind of “g,” according to Michael McCloskey, senior author of the paper.
“What we think might be going on here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. “Looptail g is something we’ve never been taught to write, so we may not learn its shape well,” he said.
“More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does and does not yield detailed, accurate, and accessible knowledge.”
In a playback video on John Hopkin’s YouTube channel, four different g’s, labeled one through four, appear on the screen where viewers are asked to guess which is the correct “g”.
(*Spoiler Ahead*)
The correct answer is number 3.
Meanwhile, this study also led to research questioning the impact that writing less and using more devices is having on our reading abilities.
“What about kids who are just learning to read? Do they have a little more trouble with that g shape because they haven’t been forced to pay attention to it and write it?” McCloskey said.
“That’s something we don’t really know. Our findings give us an intriguing way to look at questions about the importance of writing for reading…”
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