One of the main advantages of using a hierarchical structured tiers is the possibility to split the content of an annotation unit on a parent tier automatically into smaller parts on another tier. This can be a child tier, but also an independent tier, outside of a hierarchy. E.g. the words on an utterance tier could be split into separate words. This is called tokenizing in ELAN. These steps will guide you through this process:
All tokens (words in this example) on the destination tier have the same size (i.e. duration), even when tokenizing to a tier from the type time subdivision. You can adjust their length, as described in Changing the boundaries of an existing selection and annotation.
For symbolic associations, there is no need to use the tokenizer. Instead, go to the grid viewer and make sure the checkbox next to the dropdown menu is selected. Now you can fill in the annotations of the symbolic associations in their column of the grid. See also The Grid Viewer. If you want to copy or filter the contents from 1 tier to another symbolic associated tier, have a look at How to filter and copy tiers.
Tabs and newline characters are always treated as delimiters.