| The study investigated the spatial preposition acquisition over among Chinese EFL learners. It was to explore whether there exists a correlation between their use of the preposition and the centralness of spatial meanings of the word. It was hypothesized that 1) the spatial meanings of over could be ranked from the most central to the most non-central, and 2) in the very distinctive EFL context of China, the degree of central meanings of over is correlated with EFL learners'use of the word. 34 native speakers of English and 116 Chinese college EFL learners participated in the study. They were divided into two groups, and the group of native speakers, that is, Group A, was given the task of ranking, and the group of learners, that is, Group B, was given the task of gap-filling. Group A was required to rank six spatial meanings of over from central to peripheral in Task Sheet 1, while Group B was required to fill in the blanks of 108 sentences in Task Sheet 2 with appropriate prepositions with reference to the corresponding pictures. A pilot study was conducted mostly for the purpose of evaluating the time needed and excluding some apparent ambiguities from Task Sheet 2. The results of the ranking task and that of the gap-filling task were processed with a Spearman rank-order correlation analysis. The results showed that there is a significant correlation between the central-peripheral order and the performance in the gap-filling task. The study proves that people in different countries have the common sense that the cognition of spatial orientation develops from central to periphery, though, roughly. The study also suggests that learners should immerge themselves into the "foreignness"and know the subtle differences between vocabulary items. Central-periphery theory can be a reference to the teaching of spatial prepositions, especially those with a number of related meanings.
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