Learning to read the alphabet is something we do from a young age, but researchers have discovered there’s one letter that’s confusing most people — the letter ‘g’.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, found that most people can’t identify the correct form of a lower case g, or even write it, despite seeing it daily.
Unlike most letters, the lower case g has two forms: the opentai,l one most people use (it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it), and the looptail form commonly seen in print and online in fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that while everyone can read the looptail g just fine, most people can’t write it or even correctly identify it.
“We think that if we look at something enough, especially if we have to pay attention to its shape as we do during reading, then we would know what it looks like. But our results suggest that’s not always the case,” said the study’s lead author Michael McCloskey.
In the study, only two of 38 participants named g when they were asked to list letters with two lower case forms, and only one could write both.
“We would say: ‘There’re two forms of g. Can you write them?’ And people would look at us and just stare for a moment because they had no idea,” Kimberly Wong, a junior undergraduate at Johns Hopkins said.
“Once you really nudged them on, insisting there are two types of g, some would still insist there is no second g.”
In another experiment, 16 people were asked to write the letter after reading a paragraph filled with the looptail g 14 times. Half wrote the opentail g, while the others attempted the looptail, but only one wrote it correctly.
Finally the team asked 25 participants to identify the correct looptail g in a multiple-choice test with four options — just seven succeeded.
According to the study’s authors, the results suggest we may not recognise the looptail version because we don’t write it often.
“Many researchers are thinking now that learning to write plays an important role in learning to read,” McCloskey explained. “We’re writing less and less in our culture nowadays.”
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