Word frequency distributions & LNRE models • type-token statistics for any type-rich population with Zipf-like probability distribution (LNRE = Large Number of Rare Events, Baayen 2001) • extrapolation of vocabulary growth & frequency spectrum to larger samples ( ➟ morphological productivity, vocabulary richness, stylometry, data sparseness, etc.) • estimation of vocabulary size from small samples (e.g. sentence patterns or word senses) • prior distribution in Bayesian inference & population model for Good-Turing smoothing V m E[V m]

In this study, various German language corpora were compared in order to discover the extent to which syllable frequencies remain stable across different contexts and modalities. Although considerable differences in relative frequency were found among the more common syllables, rank numbers proved to be more robust. Variation across corpora was mostly due to vocabulary characteristics of particular corpus domains rather than to systematic differences between spoken and written language. The results indicate that syllable frequencies in written corpora can be taken as a rough estimate for their frequency in spoken language. Index Terms: syllabary, syllable frequencies, spoken and written language corpora