This paper presents a work on the acquisition of the prosodic knowledge that will be incorporated in a Word Prosody agent of a distributed speech understanding system (MICRO). The multiagent architecture of MICRO, based on wholistic analytic double processing, is first described. MICRO uses prosody with a rather new view. This group of agents quickly produces information that will be used by the analytic pathway (acoustic-phonetic analysis, lexical access, syntactic and semantic analysis, ...) as anchor points or for lexical hypotheses filtering or sorting. We discuss the role of the Word Prosody agent in this architecture and the induced requirements for its design. Then, we present some experiments that were made in order to decipher the prosodic encoding of word boundaries and lexical categories.