Is Old French tougher to parse?

International audience; Medieval French is known to be relatively hard to parse, with several possible sources of confusion for automatic parsers, among which its flexible word order and its graphical and syntactic variation, both synchronically and diachronically. In this work, we study in particular the influence of word order, by comparing the performances of two state-of-the-art syntactic parsers trained and evaluated on two treebanks: the Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF), a treebank of Old French (9th-13th century) and the Google Stanford Dependency treebank of contemporary French.