Finding your stimuli with a Textgrid

Textgrids allow you to add boundaries on a wav file and label what occurred in that wave file. This is helpful for annotation, but also for eventually pulling out snippets of the wav file that you want for something else (e.g. for stimuli).

Follow these steps to get started:

In Praat, Open > Read from file - this will pop up a window and allow you to navigate to where your file is located.

Once the file is in your Objects window, select it, and then create a textgrid by selecting Annotate > To Textgrid...

You will need to name your Tiers. Here I am choosing to have just one Tier named "stim"

Select both the sound and the textgrid, and click View & Edit. This will pop up a new window where you can annotate what is in the textgrid and when it starts/ends

Listen through the wav file and find the places where stimuli is being produced. For example, in this example I listened through and found the word 'apple' (the first intended stimuli in this recording). I then selected it by clicking on the beginning and dragging to the end, and hit "Enter". Hitting Enter will add the boundaries around the selected part. With that selected, you can press Tab to hear the demarcated section. Make sure it contains all the sounds it's supposed to, but not too much extra silence around it. Then select the Stim tier (this will be yellow when it's selected, as shown here) and type in the name of the file. In this case, my naming convention is sp_f1_apple (for spanish speaker, female1, word).

Continue through the file and only do this for clips of the wav file that you will want to extract. For example, you might skip the experimenter telling the speaker what they should be saying next, as you don't want that to be a separate file later.

Command+I will zoom in on the sound, while Command +O will zoom out, allowing you to see more or less of the wav file as needed. You can scroll at the bottom to move along the file.