We use letters every day of our lives, but apparently, there is a lowercase 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 the lowercase letter g.
One of them is the open tail ‘g’ which most of us would have handwritten with its image comparable to “a noose with a fishhook dangling from it”.
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Then there’s the ‘g’ loop tail which appears in print, for example books and newspapers, as well as Serif fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri; We’ve all seen this typeface a million times, but remembering seems to be a whole different challenge altogether.
There were 38 volunteers in the study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Perception and Human Performance and they were asked to list letters that they thought had two variations in print.
In the first experiment, “most of the participants did not recall the existence of looptail g” while only two people couldtype looptail g accurately.
“They don’t quite know what this letter looks like, although they can read it,” said co-author Gali Ellenblum. saying.
The participants were then asked to find examples of the g tail in the text and to reproduce this style of lettering after this and in the end only one person was able to do this while half of the group wrote an open g .
The multiple choice question that was posed to the participantsYouTube/John Hopkins University
Finally, the study participants were asked to identify the letter g in a multiple choice test with four choices of the letter where seven out of 25 managed to do it correctly.
So how can we know a letter but not recognize it?
It could have to do with the fact that we’re not taught to write this type of ‘g’, according to Michael McCloskey, the paper’s lead author.
“What we think may be happening 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 were never taught to write, so we may not let’s learn their form as well,” he said.
“More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which mass exposure does and does not produce detailed, accurate and accessible knowledge.”
In a replay 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 the correct ‘g’.
(*Forward spoiler*)
The correct answer is number 3.
Meanwhile, this study has also led research to question the impact of less typing and more device usage on our reading skills.
“What about kids who are just learning to read? Do they have a little more trouble with this g-shape because they haven’t been forced to pay attention to it and write it down?” McCloskey said.
“That’s something we really don’t know. Our findings give us an intriguing way to look at questions about the importance of writing for reading…”
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