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Following up on "Versing" (6/19/2012) and "Vers(e|u)s" (6/20/2012), here are the perception-test results from the 56 people who sent me their answers before I posted the answer key.

Some overall statistics follow.

524/1120 answers were "versus" (47%), while 596/1120 answers were "verses".

Overall, 616/1120 answers were correct (55%). This happens to correspond with the percentage of "versus" stimuli (11/20).

The percentage of "versus" answers by stimulus (numbers 1-10 in the first row, 11-20 in the second) was

42.9 32.1 71.4 35.7 35.7 64.3 33.9 35.7 53.6 50.0

57.1 26.8 44.6 35.7 44.6 67.9 76.8 44.6 62.5 19.6

The percentage of correct answers by stimulus was

42.9 67.9 71.4 35.7 35.7 35.7 66.1 64.3 46.4 50.0

42.9 73.2 44.6 35.7 55.4 67.9 76.8 44.6 62.5 80.4

The percent of correct answers by subject was

60 30 85 50 50 55 55 40 95 50

35 60 85 50 50 30 55 50 55 65

60 30 65 50 55 50 65 60 60 45

55 45 65 65 65 50 40 55 55 70

45 55 30 70 35 60 45 55 55 80

45 55 55 60 65 60

The route to successful guessing in this experiment was to ignore the consonants and vowels, and concentrate on the prosody. The two words have very different functions — in these examples, versus is a funny kind of coordinator, while verses is a plural noun — and this translates into different expected patterns of pitch and (especially) duration.

Subject #9, who scored 95%, was DDB, a "33-year-old Canadian", who wrote:

I tried not to use contextual cues, but can’t be sure I didn’t.

I have a feeling I correlated longer-duration speech with ‘verses’.

Subject #9, who scored 85%, was RDK, from Florida, Georgia, Tennesse, Montana, and New Jersey, who wrote:

I feel like I did use "distributional" cues (to the extent that that's possible with words in isolation), e.g., duration, but I suppose that's a moot point if I scored at or below chance. I do feel like I distinguish these words in speech, but I'd have to actually look at my own production to determine if that impression is based in fact.

Several other subjects who scored well reported using similar strategies.

Overall, it's clear that there's some signal here. The binomial estimate of the 95% confidence interval for the true probability of success in this experiment is 55% ± 3%, so that respondents are certainly doing better than 50% overall. (On the other hand, you could score 55% by guessing "versus" all the time — though that is clearly not the strategy people followed — so depending on what you take the null hypothesis to be, subjects either did or didn't do better than chance…)

Several people complained about the stimuli being "truncated" or "cut off" — that comes with the territory here, since words as pronounced in context are very different from words pronounced in isolation. And since the usage of these two words in these examples is so different, including the context would generally give the answer away.

The original question was whether it's plausible that language learners are justified in mis-analyzing things like

Tonight's game: Philadelphia versus Toronto

as

Tonight's game: Philadelphia verses Toronto

where "verses" is construed as the third-person singular present form of a verb "to verse", meaning "to oppose" or "to play against". Tony from Toronto observed that

I've never heard of this usage before and am baffled by it since versus and verses are quite distinct when written and when pronounced.

I felt that this was probably an example of the difficulty that most people have in distinguishing between how a word feels to them when they think about it, and how it actually sounds when they say it. My belief, which I think is largely supported by these results, is that in American English the two word-forms "versus" and "verses" are nearly or completely homophonous in practical terms.

Indeed, given that the subjects who scored best generally explained that they focused on the prosody, the relevant cases (like "Philadelphia vers(u|e)s Toronto") would be less distinct than the stimuli used in the experiment.

As reader LB wrote when sending in her answers,

Interesting experiment! I thought I'd have some sort of grip on it, since the two words taste different to me, but after listening to the clips I doubt I'll beat random.

In fact, LB scored 65%.

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