We investigate social evaluation of the verb-particle alternation in English (e.g. I took the trash out ~ I took out the trash). Kroch and Small (1978) find that radio show hosts use the verb-particle-object order more than their guests, presumably to adhere to prescriptive norms disfavoring sentence-final prepositions. Our perception study, which employs Labov et al.’s (2011) newscaster paradigm, assesses this claim. Newscasters produced either the verb-particle-object order or the verb-object-particle order sentence-finally, although ratings between these two conditions did not differ significantly. This suggests that, despite Kroch and Small’s findings, listeners do not socially evaluate this alternation in perception.