The devil's in the "g"-tails

[zak]

“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,” Johns Hopkins cognitive scientist Michael McCloskey, the study’s senior author, said in a news release. “But our results suggest that's not always the case".

There's One Letter In The Alphabet That Almost No One Can Write | HuffPost

Knowledge of letter shapes is central to reading. In experiments focusing primarily on a single letter shape—the “looptail” lowercase print G—we found surprising gaps in skilled readers’ knowledge. In Experiment 1 most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g when asked if G has two lowercase print forms, and almost none were able to write looptail g accurately. In Experiment 2 participants searched for Gs in text with multiple looptail gs. Asked immediately thereafter to write the g form they had seen, half the participants produced an “opentail” g (the typical handwritten form), and only one wrote looptail g accurately. In Experiment 3 participants performed poorly in discriminating looptail g from distractors with important features mislocated or misoriented. These results have implications for understanding types of knowledge about letters, and how this knowledge is acquired. For example, our findings speak to hypotheses concerning the role of writing in learning letter shapes. More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does, and does not, yield detailed, accurate, accessible knowledge. In this context we relate our findings to studies showing poor knowledge or memory for various types of stimuli despite extensive exposure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-13691-001

 

[mrtn]

I thought #1 is right, probably because it resembles more closely the print version. never seen or written something like #3

I learned to write it other way round in school and that's what my brain keeps seeing

I guess it's like when all Chinese people look the same for non-asians. the difference to the other letters is so strong that the brain doesn't care about the details.

 

[Arwenn]

I’m with you @mrtn, I thought the correct way is #1. If I was to try and write it as depicted in #3, it’d look more like a weird lowercase p.

 

[loreta]

maybe I did not understand the issue. If you write the word gigi, it is not like number 3, sorry. But if you write GIGI, yes. So I really don't understand the issue.

 

[mrtn]

Printed books or longer texts often use typefaces with serifs, which have a small g like #3. But today most text on websites and writings/letters, manuals or whatever use sans-serif typefaces that are more similar to #1 in their symmetry even if the have an open loop instead.

 

[zak]

i was looking for in my french, english and spanish books, and in all, the g minuscule was in mode #3.
I never paid too much attention to this, because in the end it didn't prevent me to read it, whatever his way of being written.

If I write it with the right hand, my g looks more like #3, and likewise by writing it with the left hand my g tends more naturally towards #3.
And in calligraphy version, no matter the hand the #3 takes shape, and sometimes does not take shape to follow another path.