The Versant language suite includes tests of English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Arabic.
In 1996, Jared Bernstein and Brent Townsend founded Ordinate Corporation to develop a system that would use speech processing technology and linguistic and test theory to provide an automatically delivered and automatically scored spoken language test.
During the test, the system presents a series of recorded prompts at a conversational pace and elicits oral responses from the test-taker.
While keeping up with the conversational pace, a person has to track what is being said, extract meaning as speech continues, and formulate and produce a relevant and intelligible response.
[2] The Versant tests are designed to measure these real-time psycholinguistic aspects of spoken performance in a second language.
The automated scoring technology is optimized using a large number of speech samples from both native and non-native speakers.
Versant tests are currently used by academic institutions, corporations, and government agencies around the world.
Versant tests provide information that can be used to determine if employees or students have the necessary spoken language skills to interact effectively.
[4] The Versant Spanish Test was used in a study by Blake, et al. (2008)[5] to evaluate whether distance-learning courses are as valid a way to start learning a foreign language as traditional face-to-face classes that meet five times a week with respect to oral proficiency.
[13] Another criticism is that the Versant tests do not measure communicative abilities because there are no interaction exchanges between live participants.
Versant, in Downey et al. (2008) claim that the psycholinguistic competencies that are assessed in their tests underlie a larger spoken language performance.