Little to no evidence of the QWERTY effect in Japanese word valence rating.

Abstract

The QWERTY effect is a phenomenon in which words typed with more characters from the right side (everything to the right of T, G, and B) of a standard keyboard (i.e. QWERTY keyboard) are evaluated as having a higher valence or a more positive rating than those typed with characters from the left side of the keyboard. In this study, I attempted to replicate the QWERTY effect for Japanese words. I performed an identical analysis of a Japanese translation of an English dataset as was done in the study that first reported the QWERTY effect. Initially, I failed to replicate the QWERTY effect. However, when I added three other datasets to the original set for similar analyses, I obtained a small but significant effect. This result suggests that the QWERTY effect is present across languages. However, the size of the effect and the results of a power analysis indicate that it is difficult to conclude that the QWERTY effect is truly present in, and is a reliable measure of, the Japanese language.