Previous studies on the Persian language have found that the presence of a rising accent on a constituent with distinct pitch range and tonal alignment adjustments assists native-speaking listeners in narrowing the referent of the constituent. This study addresses two questions: whether non-native speakers who are able to correctly produce the phonetic properties that correlate with Persian contrastive focus use prosodic cues in processing, as previous studies have shown for native speakers; and whether they are able to use prosodic cues in processing Persian contrastive focus. Also, we investigate whether there is a relationship between the use of prosodic cues in processing and in production. Sixteen native speakers of standard Persian and 16 Mandarin speakers of Persian living in Iran participated in 2 tasks that investigate their production and perception of prosodic cues to contrastive focus. In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a whiteboard, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus. In the perception task, participants responded to utterances containing a contrastive pitch accent which could either be appropriate (felicitous) or inappropriate (infelicitous) given the target information structure. Overall results indicate that the Mandarin speakers made use of prosodic cues in both production and processing, although their production of focus prosody differed from that of native speakers in several respects. The results further suggest that there are no strong correlations between the results of production and perception experiments, and that there is considerable variability even among native speakers in the use of prosodic cues in production and perception.