We present a sentence recall study revealing an effect of animacy on word order in French, which previous studies failed to find. Our findings contribute to the debate as to the stage of sentence production at which animacy, as a dimension of conceptual accessibility, plays a role. Models of sentence production have proposed separate stages for the assignment of lexical items to grammatical roles and for the linear ordering of constituents (Bock & Levelt 1994). Previous studies have found evidence for an accessibility effect on grammatical assignment only (Bock & Warren 1985) or an effect on both levels (Tanaka et al. 2011). A recent sentence recall study in French (Thuilier et al. 2021), comparing the effect of animacy in three constructions (voice alternation, coordination, ditransitive), found an effect of animacy only in grammatical role assignment. In ditransitives, varying NP’s animacy (ex. The project manager assigned [a commercial agent/a new budget]NP [to a decorator]PP), revealed an unexpected preference for the NP-PP order (i.e. the canonical order) for inanimate NPs (i.e. prototypical themes), suggesting that prototypical arguments tend to appear in their canonical position. To further these findings, we studied the recall of two sentence types taking into account the semantic role and prototypicality of arguments: transitives (voice alternations) [1] and ditransitives (word order variation) [2]. In transitives, in addition to animacy, we manipulated the semantic role, experiencer vs. stimulus, by varying the verb type (experiencer/stimulus object verbs, Ferreira 1994) as a between-items variable. In ditransitives, we varied the theme NP animacy on three levels: animate, abstract, concrete. We further manipulated PP’s semantic role (human recipient vs. inanimate locative) again by changing the type of verb (Faghiri et al. 2020). Our results show a clear effect of semantic role in both sentence types: In voice alternation (Table 1), participants tend to produce sentences with human experiencer subjects; in ditransitives (Table 2), participants tend to produce PP-NP sentences to put human recipients first. Hence, contra Thuilier et al. (2021), taking into account semantic roles, we find a robust animate-first effect both on linear order and grammatical role assignment in French. With respect to the effect of animacy vs. prototypicality of the theme, our results are in line with the hypothesis put forward in Thuilier et al. (2021). They further show that prototypicality (concrete vs. animate/abstract; cf. Table 2) is a better predictor than animacy (animate vs. concrete/abstract; Est.=-0.15, p=0.25): Participants are more likely to produce NP-PP sentences with concrete NP themes. In sum, our study supports the general observation that psycholinguistic studies benefit from linguistically finer-tuned designs.