quote:

For evidence of this relative weakness [of the linguistic relativity hypothesis], we need look no further than some of Lera Boroditsky's excellent recent research. Her work with Caitlin Fausey5 suggests that English speakers are somewhat more likely than Spanish speakers to specify an agent in describing accidental events ("She broke the vase" versus "The vase broke"), and also somewhat more likely to remember who the agent was. These effects, though statistically significant, were quite small, in absolute terms as well as in comparison to the within-group variation. Thus students at the Universidad de Chile were on average 4.4% worse at remembering accidental agents than intentional ones, while Stanford students were on average 1.9% better.6 Even to get this much of an effect, the event videos had to be carefully crafted to make the incidents and agents as bland and unmemorable as possible. Furthermore, in a follow-up experiment, the authors found that you can turn English speakers into Spanish speakers-for the purposes of this paradigm-by having them listen to 24 non-agentive sentences before the start of the experiment.

Here a lifetime of linguistic and cultural influence is overwhelmed by a minute or two of passive listening! Similarly, linguistic effects on measures of individualism are twice as small as the effects of two minutes of silent thought about your similarities or differences to others;7 and linguistic effects on orientation experiments are roughly as strong as the effects of room decor.8

5 Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky, "English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently", proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2008

6 Mark Liberman, "Never mind the conclusions, what's the evidence?", Language Log 8/30/2010

7 Mark Liberman, "How to turn Americans into Asians (or vice versa)", Language Log 8/15/2008

8 Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman, "Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning", Cognition, 83(3): 265-294, 2002.

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So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words.

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Originally posted by goofy:

Her reference is:
http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf
L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–79.