agreed, the accent location (stressed syllabe) comes down to knowing the word, but only a few cases of wrong accent give you a different word... in english you can change the word by mispronouncing the lenght of the first vowel in words like sheet, beach... both long vowel, different way to write it... although I'm sure I'm being imprecise on "long vowel" (don't know anything about phonetics), but I can't think of an example of non-accent based, italian equivalent