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posted by chromas on Friday April 06 2018, @06:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-storey dept.

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

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/


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  • (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday April 06 2018, @10:16AM

    by BsAtHome (889) on Friday April 06 2018, @10:16AM (#663363)

    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.

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