Getting PsychoPy to show word word of a sentence at a time during a self paced reading experiment

Builder
1

If this template helps then use it. If not then just delete and start from scratch.

OS (e.g. Win10): Mac OS High Sierra
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): v 1.9
Standard Standalone? (y/n) If not then what?:y
What are you trying to achieve?:
attempting to run a self-paced reading experiment in PsychoPy using the text box to input stims such that the experiment shows one word at a time instead of the entire sentence all at once
What did you try to make it work?:
putting each word into a separate trial but that seems excessive and unnecessary
What specifically went wrong when you tried that?:
Include pasted full error message if possible. “That didn’t work” is not enough information.

2

Have you searched this very forum for “self-paced reading”?

3

I have but didn’t find anything useful. Is there some way to do this without needing to learn anything about writing code in python etc. Or, without needing to do one word of each sentence per trial using the text box only. That is, some instruction in the textbox or other way. So for example, if I wanted to use the sentence “The horse raced passed the barn fell.” And, if I wanted to create an experiment that displayed this sentence word by word “the” “horse” “raced” “passed”…etc. Can I do that in builder without needing to use a new trial for each word?

4

And yet a number of people followed those approaches and got their self-paced reading tasks working…

5

I tried it again and got this in the PsychoPy output window:

######### Running: /Users/Paul/Dropbox/PsychoPy/experiment1_lastrun.py #########
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “soundfile.pyc”, line 142, in
OSError: sndfile library not found

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/Users/Paul/Dropbox/PsychoPy/experiment1_lastrun.py”, line 14, in
from psychopy import locale_setup, sound, gui, visual, core, data, event, logging, clock
File “/Applications/PsychoPy3.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python3.6/psychopy/sound/init.py”, line 79, in
from . import backend_sounddevice as backend
File “/Applications/PsychoPy3.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python3.6/psychopy/sound/backend_sounddevice.py”, line 20, in
import soundfile as sf
File “”, line 961, in _find_and_load
File “”, line 950, in _find_and_load_unlocked
File “”, line 646, in _load_unlocked
File “”, line 616, in _load_backward_compatible
File “soundfile.pyc”, line 156, in
File “posixpath.pyc”, line 78, in join
TypeError: expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not list

Please let me know what I should do at this point.

Thank you

6

In the first instance, try searching for the errors you encounter. That might lead you to existing suggestions like this:

8

Hello Michael,

I am now attempting to use PsychoPy on a windows (8.1) laptop. It has a i7 2.6 ghz processor and 8 mb of ram. Which version of PsychoPy would be the best one to use? I have tried to use the latest release of PsychoPy but I can’t get the software to run on the laptop while older versions worked but with significant glitches.

Also, can you direct me to a resource for learning python for psychopy for beginners?

Thanks,
Paul