In intonation languages like German, there typically is an inverse relationship between prosodic and discourse prominence. Given referents, whose discourse prominence is high, are marked with low prosodic prominence while new referents, whose discourse prominence is low, are marked with high prosodic prominence, with gradual differences along the given-new scale. Recent production studies on non-assertive speech acts show systematic deviations from this inverse relationship. In German exclamations, given referents regularly are produced with prominent accents, and overall are prosodically as prominent as new referents. In this paper, we study the perception of prosodic prominence in sentence types expressing different speech acts. In a rating study testing exclamatives and declaratives, participants rated the discourse prominence of an object referent with different degrees of prosodic prominence (deaccentuation, H* and L+H* accents) on a given-new scale. The results show an inverse relation of prosodic and discourse prominence for declaratives and exclamatives but the differences between accentuation and deaccentuation are significantly smaller for exclamatives than for declaratives. Thus, there is some decoupling of prosodic prominence and discourse prominence in exclamatives but not to the same degree as has been observed in production. We discuss potential reasons for this difference.