The accent advantage effect in phoneme monitoring—faster responses to a target phoneme at the beginning of an L + H*-accented word than to a target phoneme at the beginning of an unaccented word—is viewed as a product of listeners' predictive capabilities [Cutler (1976). Percept. Psychophys. 20(1), 55–60]. However, previous studies have not established what information listeners use to form these predictions [Cutler (1987). Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 84–87; Cutler and Darwin (1981). Percept. Psychophys. 29(3), 217–224]. This article presents evidence that at least the information in the syllable immediately preceding a target phoneme is necessary to cue the predictive attention allocation that underlies the accent advantage effect.