Unless you're into typography or hand lettering, you'll likely have a hard time determining which of the lowercase 'G' shapes above is correct.
It's nothing terrible. As it turns out, most people can't tell either, despite having seen the letter millions of times, and it has a lot to do with how we think about our ability to read and write.
Image from: www.youtube.com
Standard thinking in psychology suggests that our ability to read is directly related to our ability to recognize letters. So one would expect us to have a very detailed knowledge of every letter, down to every circle and loop.
just choose a lowercase "g" and the idea collapses.
You see, there's more than one way to write this letter, and we're not talking about differences caused by individual quirks of handwriting.
In modern typography, there are two standard ways in which the lowercase 'g' can be rendered, either as a single-story or open-tailed letter, or as a double-story or looped 'g'. Here's a picture of the two side by side:
Image from: upload.wikimedia.org
Now the open tail doesn't cause any headaches because it's similar to what people who use the Latin alphabet are taught to write in school.
This loop-tail version of the letter baffles people - not only do many not realize that there are two different print shapes, but it's hard to remember which shape is correct, and most can't draw it even when they know what it's supposed to look like.
This was discovered by a team of cognitive scientists at Johns Hopkins University who tested people's understanding of contrasting letter shapes in a series of three experiments.
The first 38 participants recruited for the experiment from a pool of university students were asked a series of questions about their understanding of different letter shapes – with surprising results.
"Despite repeated questioning and despite being directly informed that G is two lowercase letters, almost half of the participants revealed no knowledge of the loop tail 'g', and only 1 of 38 participants could spell the loop tail 'g.' "Correct," the team writes in the study.
To address this apparent lack of letter knowledge, the team conducted a second experiment in which 16 young participants had to read a paragraph paying particular attention to all the lowercase 'g's - in print.
When the text was removed, participants were asked to write the letter “g” as it appeared in the text they had just read.
Again, only one managed to get it right. Half of them thought they saw the open-tail version, and one even went crazy over it.
"One participant thought that writing 'g' with an open tail was the only possible response to the task: when asked to write a G that she had seen, she said, 'That's silly,'" the team wrote.
In the third experiment, the researchers made things even simpler: 44 new participants had to choose the correct loop-tailed “g” or double-decker “a” shape. Yes. Most of them got the 'g' completely wrong
"We think the point here is that we learn most letter shapes in part because we have to write them in school," said cognitive scientist Michael McCloskey, the study's senior author.
"We've never been taught to write the 'g' loop, so we might as well not learn that form."
According to the team, these findings support the idea that we don't really learn letters in fine detail, but just enough to tell them apart.
What's more, by uncovering these inconsistencies, we still don't understand much about how people perceive the world around them, even when it comes to something as incredibly common as letters.
"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?" said McCloskey. "This is something we don't really know. Our findings give us an intriguing way to look at questions about the importance of writing for reading."
