It has been well established that prosody plays a key role in sentence processing, influencing various aspects such as lexical activation, syntactic parsing, information structure marking, and the signalling of pragmatic information, including speech attitudes, acts, and emotions. In the current study, we particularly focus on whether accentuating the verb or noun in the construction “它看起来像X” (It looks like an X) yields different pragmatic meanings in Mandarin. In a rating experiment, Mandarin-speaking participants assessed the likelihood of the statement “It looks like an X” (e.g., It looks like a pencil) referring to a target (e.g., a pencil) in a picture that participants could not see. Results have shown a higher likelihood when the target noun carries a contrastive accent, as opposed to when the verb carries a contrastive accent, aligning with evidence from other languages (e.g., English). This study extends the existing research to Mandarin and offers novel evidence on Mandarin listeners’ categorization of intonation contours, indicating a functionally equivalent resource of “prosodic prominence” across languages, despite variations in the phonetic implementation (i.e. pitch accenting in English vs. pitch range expansion in Mandarin).