Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a more direct measure of input processing, comparing 60 German learners of English to native speakers on a probe detection task. We also controlled for focal accent. With this task, we found no effect of sentence position or word length on word learning. Our results suggest that the relationship between perceptual salience, segmentation and word learning is more complex than previous research suggests. (Contains 19 footnotes, 6 tables and 2 figures.)