About the generation of similar words

[ReneZ]

René, in the earlier version of the analysis, I defined the “core” simply as the first word of the burst. Under that operational definition, the first word was indeed usually rarer than the other members. But the newer analysis suggests that this first word is often just a temporal anchor, not the best candidate for the actual source form.

I am trying to understand this. 
The earlier result was a clearly statistical outcome. Is that still the case in the newer analysis, or is that more like an impression?
Shouldn't the cases, where a second core word is a more frequentword, have been included in the overall statistics shown before? In that case they are still a minority.
This depends how the search was done. After having completed the analysis of any (potential) core word, is the next word to be tested the word immediately following it, or is the search continued at the end of the string of core with variants?