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Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Friday April 06 2018, @07:40AM (3 children)
The ability to read is based on pattern recognition and not so much on single letters as written. The fact that many (including myself) cannot identify a specific form of a typeset letter does not mean we cannot read or write (either by hand or machine). We learn to map a specific pattern read to a word/meaning. This enables us to read "fast". There has been other research into this, which exchanges letters within a wrod and we are still albe to see(interpret what the word is (supposed to be).
Mapping the recognized pattern back to its constituent parts (the letters) is not a task that is practiced as much as the other way around. We read more than we write. But even with writing, we use patterns to write. You have a "program" to activate muscles to write a specific phrase/syllable and construct a word and sentence from learned sequences. It is when we start looking back that we can see errors and analyze what we've done in letter-detail (modern days: we see the wavy red line under the word in machine-writing with spell-checker enabled and try to fix the problem).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @08:40AM (1 child)
One of the great strengths of English is its information density, or redundancy, things written with mistakes can and will be automatically corrected upon reading.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday April 06 2018, @10:16AM
I fully agree.
The long-word problem is usually solved by the field-of-vision, where you "see" the constituent parts of a long word separately (Danish is another example that can create very long words). The constituents form yet another pattern template, which then is interpreted.
This actually leads to quite funny mistakes while reading. When you combine smaller words into a long one, then your pattern recognition system may fail if the long word can be "broken" into pieces at several distinct places, creating a different meaning while still making sense on some other level. This is where you have to stop reading and re-read the word's constituent parts to make sense out of it in the sentence's context.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday April 06 2018, @02:55PM
Yeah just because we can recognize something doesn't mean we can draw it from scratch. Whether it's a typographical character or a human face.
http://www.caltech.edu/news/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell-1013 [caltech.edu]
Perhaps the way it works is as if the sensory and other neurons are "reading out numbers" in a Bingo Hall of the brain and when the right numbers are read the Halle Berry (or "g" letter) neurons yell out "BINGO! Halle Berry!" and most of the rest of the neurons go "OK, I guess that's Halle Berry".
But to actually draw Halle Berry takes a lot more coordination and effort from a lot more neurons and possibly a different set of neurons. After all when I think g while typing vs when I think g while writing, the "concept g" neurons are probably mostly the same but the output neurons are different depending on whether I'm typing or writing. And when I think and type "might" far fewer neurons might be thinking of the letter g but it still gets typed :).