Most everyone over the age of five knows the alphabet and can recognize letters, but there are more than a few grown adults who don't know that a very common letter, a lower case "g" can be written one of two ways. Usually, it's printed with a fish hook open tail coming down from a loop. It can also be written similar to the way it shows up in fonts like Times New Roman, and the bottom is not a hook, but a closed loop. A new study at Johns Hopkins showed how confused some are with the two forms.
A team of researchers asked study subjects to name letters that had more than one way of being written. Only two out of 38 knew that "g" had a second form. Then they asked participants to read a paragraph with fourteen instances of the letter and to say each word that contained a "g" out loud. They were then asked to write the words containing a "g" down, and half of the recipients chose the hook tail version. When asked to write the letter with a closed loop tail, only one could. Finally, when shown four images of the letter, only 7 out of 25 respondents could pick out the correct form. Check out the video, brought to you by the letter "g."
