Two groups of 15 adults participated in two preference rating tasks for written sentence forms. Pairs of sentences were presented to the subjects which differed only in the grammatical form used to express the double object construction (one which has both a direct and an indirect object). Several hypotheses were formulated regarding the nature of subjects' preferences for various combinations of grammatical form and pronominalization. Results indicated that adults show clear preferences for one grammatical form in most instances and that rules can be formulated for these preferences. The relevance of these results for the examination of current language assessment tests and the development of language training programs is discussed.