While various sentence processing models predict that longer syntactic dependencies are more taxing to process due to the higher information content, few have investigated how dependency length influences the use of prosody, and how children acquire this capacity. This study tackles these two issues via comparing anaphoric dependencies produced by Mandarin-speaking adults and children. In the ambiguous Mandarin sentence: “Boris dreamt that Miffy painted zi-ji ’s face”, the anaphoric element ‘zi-ji’ can have two potential dependencies (allowed by grammar): (a) a local dependency where ‘zi-ji’ refers to Miffy; (b) a non-local dependency where ‘zi-ji’ refers to Boris. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited such sentences in both interpretations from Mandarin-speaking adults and 5-6 year-olds (20 per group). Linear-mixed-effect modeling of relevant prosodic parameters revealed that (1) the longer the dependency, the longer the duration of the anaphor ‘zi-ji’; (2) in the non-local dependency, the non-head syllable ‘zi’(falling tone) bears the prosodic prominence of longer duration and a lower minimum pitch; (3) despite exhibiting similar tendency, 5-6 year-olds’ prosodic production is not adult-like yet. This result is consistent with the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis, which postulates that prosodic prominence (duration in particular) coincides with the language units of higher information content.