use of & and $

[Maki Yasui]

I am working for Dr. Katie Alcock looking at  older 1-yr-olds' speech. 
We are having difficulties with getting & and $ symbols recognised in 
our scripts- when we ran check opened file, these symbols seem to be 
creating some problems. I have tried to describe them as below:

We are using $ for error tiers  (mainly phonological) so what we are 
doing at the moment is for example:
%err:    guck=duck $PHO
But the system seems to reject the use of $ in this context. Does 
anyone know how to solve this?

Re: "&"
We are probably using & for wrong things at the moment- we have used it 
for unintelligible sounds: see an example below
*CHI:    &tik.
Now I realise that it's actually for phonological fragments, so 
something other than "&" should be used. But what's best to use?  I am 
wondering whether we should use "yyy" instead. Is it accepted that we 
use "yy" or "yyy" and follow it by the English orthography of the 
sounds using "%pho"? The manual seems to recommend using the IPA but it 
doesn't seem to us really necessary for the kind of analyses we are 
doing.

Many thanks,
Maki Yasui