One of the current issues in psycholinguistics is how the frequency of syntactic structures influences the mental processing of sentences, especially in the case of ambiguous constructions. The present work attempts to shed light on this issue from the perspective of computational and corpus linguistics. Existing theories of human sentence processing assign different roles to frequency, varying from certain 'principle-based' models that completely ignore it to 'experience-based' models relying on frequency alone. The present work develops a frequency-based parsing component that may be combined with other factors influencing disambiguation. This module, named the Optimized Frequency Constraint (OFC), addresses questions largely left open by existing frequency-based models: How are the frequencies of syntactic structures stored mentally? When does the human sentence processing mechanism access this stored information, and in what sequence? OFC is then applied to a range of syntactic constructions in German (licensing, attachment of phrases and relative clauses, word order, etc.) that have been used in psycholinguistic experiments. The settings of OFC's parameters are determined by analyzing German corpus data. The predictions based on OFC are confirmed by the results reported in the psycholinguistic literature in most cases, indicating that OFC offers psychologically valid predictions of the influence of frequency in human parsing.
It is generally assumed that the temperature increase associated with global climate change will lead to increased thunderstorm intensity and associated heavy precipitation events. In the present study it is investigated whether the frequency of thunderstorm occurrences will in- or decrease and how the spatial distribution will change for the A1B scenario. The region of interest is Central Europe with a special focus on the Saar-Lor-Lux region (Saarland, Lorraine, Luxembourg) and Rhineland-Palatinate.Daily model data of the COSMO-CLM with a horizontal resolution of 4.5 km is used. The simulations were carried out for two different time slices: 1971"2000 (C20), and 2071"2100 (A1B). Thunderstorm indices are applied to detect thunderstorm-prone conditions and differences in their frequency of occurrence in the two thirty years timespans. The indices used are CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy), SLI (Surface Lifted Index), and TSP (Thunderstorm Severity Potential).The investigation of the present and future thunderstorm conducive conditions show a significant increase of non-thunderstorm conditions. The regional averaged thunderstorm frequencies will decrease in general, but only in the Alps a potential increase in thunderstorm occurrences and intensity is found. The comparison between time slices of 10 and 30 years length show that the number of gridpoints with significant signals increases only slightly. In order to get a robust signal for severe thunderstorm, an extension to more than 75 years would be necessary.