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The Mental Lexicon: Online-First Articles

The influence of uppercase letter location on typing multiword passphrases

 | Concordia University of Edmonton
ORCID logo | Concordia University of Edmonton
 | Concordia University of Edmonton
Organizational policies for passwords and passphrases require certain criteria, such as minimum length or uppercase letters, to be met, often resulting in a tradeoff between complexity and ease of typing. Uppercase letters, specifically, lead to slower and more error prone entries. Our present study examined their influence on the typing of three-word passphrases. We were interested in whether uppercase letter location, which should not influence passphrase security, would influence its typing. Passphrases with no uppercase letter were typed more accurately and quickly than passphrases with an uppercase letter. Importantly, passphrases with an uppercase letter in the second word were more likely to be typed incorrectly, and were typed more slowly when entered correctly. Our findings are consistent with the linguistic information of adjacent words influencing the output of the word being typed, where an altered second word interfered with the output of both the first and second words.
Keywords: keystroke typing latencies, multiword passphrases, interactive theory of typing
Article outline
  • The influence of linguistic information on typing output
  • The linguistic properties of passwords and their typing output
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Apparatus and materials
    • Procedure
    • Data pre-processing
  • Results
    • Error rates
    • Total typing time of passphrases and individual words
  • Discussion
  • References
Published online: 16 December 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24014.gow
References (16)
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