For example, most people will assert, when asked, that there are more English words ending with “-ing” than with “-g”.
Is it possible that at least some of those people think (at least subconsciously) about words ending with the phoneme /g/ rather than the orthographic letter G? A famous experiment in which most people consistently skip “of” when counting the number of times the letter F occurs in a sentence (presumably because in “of” it stands for a /v/ sound) suggests to me that that might be not that unlikely.
most people consistently skip “of” when counting the number of times the letter F occurs in a sentence (presumably because in “of” it stands for a /v/ sound)
I don’t suppose they did the same test with “if” to check your hypothesis? Or “off”, though that one might be harder to miss because it’s longer?
Is it possible that at least some of those people think (at least subconsciously) about words ending with the phoneme /g/ rather than the orthographic letter G? A famous experiment in which most people consistently skip “of” when counting the number of times the letter F occurs in a sentence (presumably because in “of” it stands for a /v/ sound) suggests to me that that might be not that unlikely.
I don’t suppose they did the same test with “if” to check your hypothesis? Or “off”, though that one might be harder to miss because it’s longer?