The Discourse Completion Task in Romance prosody research: Status quo and outlook

The growing interest in the interfaces of prosody with other areas, notably pragmatics, has led to an interesting cross-fertilization of methods such as the Discourse Completion Task (DCT). In this chapter, we review previous and ongoing work in which the DCT method has been used to research Romance prosody. First, we introduce the design of the DCT used in pragmatics. After that, we discuss the design of the DCT used in Romance prosody and examine the strengths and weaknesses of the DCT method. Finally, we propose modifications and show how the DCT method can be further strengthened. All in all, we conclude that the DCT is an adequate method to research Romance prosody (as well as the prosody of other languages) and that future research should continue to consider how to further refine and improve this data collection instrument