The letter “g” is everywhere, but can you recognize it in the wild? According to a new study, most people are surprisingly bad at it.
You may know how to write lower-case “g”s, but how they appear on a screen or in print is different. The “looptail” g, commonly seen in books, newspapers, and fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri, often goes unnoticed.
Even though we see it every day, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that most people can’t recognize the two forms of the lower-case letter g.
Which is the correct g? Answer at the bottom of the article.
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, researchers asked 38 volunteers to list letters they thought had two varieties when printed out.
“In Experiment 1, most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g when asked if G has two lowercase print forms,” the study stated. “Almost none were able to write looptail g accurately.”
Only two volunteers could do so.
The volunteers were then asked to scan the text for instances of the looptail g and reproduce it. Only one participant succeeded, while half of them wrote the usual open tail g (<– seen here) that we're used to writing.
In the final part of the experiment, participants were asked to identify the letter g from several lookalike gs. Only seven out of 25 correctly identified the g.
In short, “They don’t entirely know what this letter looks like, even though they can read it,” said co-author Gali Ellenblum in a statement.
So what’s going on?
“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’re never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well,” explained Michael McCloskey, senior author of the study.
“More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does, and does not, yield detailed, accurate, accessible knowledge.”
The authors speculated that children growing up on screens may have a disadvantage when learning to read.
“Do they have a little bit more trouble with this form of g because they haven’t been forced to pay attention to it and write it?” McCloskey pondered. “We could ask whether children have some reading disadvantage with this form of g.”
The correct g is 3.
