Article published In: Words in the World
Edited by Laura Teddiman, Lori Buchanan and Hamad Al-Azary
[The Mental Lexicon 19:1] 2024
► pp. 161–169
The influence of uppercase letter location on typing multiword passphrases
Published online: 16 December 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24014.gow
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24014.gow
Abstract
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.
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
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