The use of acoustic correlates in the production of ironic tone of voice has been well-documented. However, how L2 learners employ these acoustic cues to decode ironic speech has been comparatively underexplored. This study aims to investigate the perceptual strategies utilized by native Mandarin speakers with advanced French proficiency to interpret the ironic tone of voice in French. 42 native Mandarin speakers participated in an irony identification task, during which they listened to utterances from a separate production task, designed to elicit ironic and non-ironic utterances. A predictive modelling approach was employed. Firstly, the results were subjected to Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM), from which we calculated the Irony Score (I-score) to estimate the predicted probability that a specific utterance would be perceived as ironic. Subsequently, through a random forest regression analysis, we explored the relationship between the calculated I-scores and eight acoustic cues, recognized as essential correlates for ironic speech, as suggested by previous literature. Our findings suggested that F0 span is the most salient cue for native Mandarin speakers learning French as L2 in perceiving irony in French. In addition, jitter, speech rate, and intensity span carried relatively more weight than other acoustic cues for irony detection.