In semantic studies of argument structure alternations as well as in recent psycholinguistic research on syntactic priming, the concept of alternation bias, ie the lexical preferences of individual verbs for one of two (or more) alternating constructions, plays a crucial role. This paper offers a detailed comparison of the results from Colleman’s (2009) corpus-based investigation of the dative alternation in Dutch with the findings from a series of picture description experiments reported in Bernolet (2008). On the one hand, this comparison reveals a striking contrast between both datasets in terms of the overall proportions of double object (DO) versus prepositional dative (PD) instances. On the other hand, it will be shown that the alternation biases of individual dative verbs are actually quite consistent across both the corpus and the experimental data, provided these are measured in a way which evaluates the observed frequencies for individual verbs against the overall observed frequencies in the respective datasets.