A descriptor was placed in the orthography at the point at which the non-speech event occurs. If a non-speech event overlaps with a spoken lexical item, the descriptor was placed next to the lexical item it co-occurred with and the character, ``>'' or ``<'' was appended or prepended to the descriptor depending on whether it is placed to the left or right of the co-occurring lexical item:
The escaped convict [ < door_slam] ran for his life
and
The escaped [door_slam >] convict ran for his life
are roughly equivalent.
If a phenomenon was noted throughout, or co-occurred with, more than one lexical item, then the phenomenon's descriptor is used in the following notation to bound the lexical items it spans: [DESCRIPTOR/] WORD WORD ... WORD [/DESCRIPTOR]
Example: [cross_talk/] The plane narrowly escaped disaster [/cross_talk] as it took off