There’sOne Letter In The Alphabet That Almost No One Can Write
字母表中有一个字母几乎没有一个人知道该怎么写
Meetthe most mysterious letter in the English language.
来见识一下英语当中最神秘的这个字母吧
It’s a letter everyone can read,but a new study finds almost no one can write it.
这是一大家都会念的字母,但一项新的研究发现几乎没有人会写。
The lowercase letter “g” has twoforms: the “opentail” one most people use, and the “looptail” formcommonly seen in print and online in fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri:
小写字母 "g" 有两种形式: 大多数人使用的 “开放式",而"环型式" 通常在印刷和在网络上以例如Times New Roman和Calibri的字体中出现。
Researchers from Johns HopkinsUniversity found that while everyone can read the looptail g just fine, mostpeople can’t write it or even correctly identify when it’s on its own.
约翰·霍普金斯大学的研究人员发现,虽然每个人都能读出"环型式" 的g,但大部分人都不能写,甚至当它单独出现时也不能正确识别它。
“We think that if we look atsomething enough, especially if we have to pay attention to its shape as we doduring reading, then we would know what it looks like,” Johns Hopkins cognitivescientist Michael McCloskey, the study’s senior author, said in a news release.“But our results suggest that’s not always the case.”
“我们以为,如果我们看一样东西看到足够的时间时,特别是当我们阅读时会注意它的形状我们就应该知道它长的是什么样子,” 约翰霍普金斯的认知科学家迈克尔·麦克洛斯基,这项研究的资深作者,在一份新闻稿中这样说。”但研究结果表明,情况并非总是如此。”
When presented with four versionsof it ― three of them incorrect ― 7 out of 25 people were able to pick theright “g.”
当我们把这个字母的四个版本 - 其中三个是不正确的- 摆在25个人面前时,只有7个人能从中选出正确 “g“。
“They don’t entirely know what thisletter looks like, even though they can read it,” said cognitive sciencegraduate student Gali Ellenblum. “This is not true of letters in general.“
“即使他们可以读,他们并不完全知道这个字母长得什么样子,” 认知科学研究生Gali Ellenblum 说。”但是对大部分的字母来说,并不存在这个问题。“
What’s going on here?”
这是怎么回事?
You can test yourself here:
您也可以做个自我测试:
In yet another experiment, 16people were given a paragraph that showed the looptail g 14 times. Respondentswere asked to speak each word aloud, then researchers requested that they writethe letter. Half wrote the opentail form anyway, and while the restattempted the looptail g, only one wrote it correctly.
还有,在另一项实验中,有16 人拿到一篇文章的其中一个段落,在这个段落里”环型式”的g出现了14次。受访者被要求大声说出每个字,然后研究人员要求他们把这个字母写下来。一半人还是写了“开放式”的,而其余的尝试写“环形式”的g,结果只有一个人写对了。
“Our findings give us an intriguingway of looking at questions about the importance of writing forreading,” McCloskey said. “Here is a naturally occurring situation where,unlike most letters, this is a letter we don’t write. We could ask whetherchildren have some reading disadvantage with this form of g.”
麦克洛斯基说: “关于写作对阅读的重要性,我们的这一发现给大家提供了一个有趣的角度来看待这一问题。”这是一个自然发生的情况,与大多数的字母不同, g这个字母,是一个我们不怎么写的。我们也可以试问一下,儿童对于这种写法的g是否有阅读障碍呢。
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