The QWERTY Effect, demonstrated in Jasmin & Casasanto, 2012,
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, is a subtle but reliable
association between the way words are typed on the QWERTY
keyboard and their emotional valence. Across 3 experiments,
Jasmin and Casasanto found that words spelled with more letters
from the right side of the keyboard were, on average, more
positive in meaning than words spelled with more letters from
the left side (i.e., there was a positive association between
the words' Right Side Advantage (RSA) and their emotional
valence ratings). In his blog post on the Language Log (March 8,
2012), Mark Liberman denounced our study, calling the
reliability of the results into question. This is our reply. Is
the QWERTY effect robust, or did the authors report a false
positive result? Replication is the best protection against
false positives. In our paper, we replicated the effect 6 times,
in 5 different corpora (one of which we divided a priori into
two parts), in 3 languages and a large corpus of pse