The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words
A keyboard’s arrangement could have a small but significant impact on how we perceive the meaning of words we type.
Specifically, the QWERTY keyboard may gradually attach more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the layout (everything to the right of T, G and B).
“We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed,” said cognitive scientist Kyle Jasmin of the University of College London, co-author of a study about the so-called “QWERTY effect” in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. “As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard.”
The effect may arise from the fact that letter combinations that fall on the right side of the keyboard tend to be easier to type than those on the left.
“If it’s easy, it tends to lend a positive meaning. If it’s harder, it can go the other way,” Jasmin said.
The QWERTY layout dates back to 1868. Until then, typewriters frequently jammed because some letters sat too close to one other on the keyboard. When typed in rapid succession, they sometimes stuck together.
‘Technology changes words, and by association languages.’
In response, inventors created the QWERTY layout and sold it to the Remington company. The layout has stuck ever since, and with the transition from typewriters to personal computers, it became ubiquitous.
Jasmin and his colleague Daniel Casasanto, a social psychologist at the New School for Social Research, knew from previous research that the difficulty of using an object affected how positively or negatively people viewed it.
The effect is called fluency, and it even seems to affect abstractions such as people’s names. The more difficult it is to pronounce a person’s name, for example, the less positively we might view that person.
Tougher-to-type letter pairs tend to be found on a QWERTY keyboard’s left side, so Jasmin and Casasanto set out to explore the effects of fluency on typing and language.