[lukasb]

"Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more."

Can they really distinguish between the impact of language on these domains rather than culture? It could be the language you speak, or it could be that you're surrounded exclusively by other people that operate this way.

[kayodelycaon]

French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken across multiple cultures. So there should be enough data to test the theory.

French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.

[djtango]

I mean I'm not really qualified or rigourous enough to prove this but if you have learned chinese and english it should be pretty damn obvious that it is linguistic. But in any case, human language and culture are intractable if you start trying to speak idiomatically.

Sure maybe you could isolate a bunch of scholars and give them a specification of Chinese and ask them to go at it, which is maybe what we do with Latin and Greek.

I would struggle to see how someone could earnestly argue the opposite, that language doesn't shape thought, when Chinese doesn't use conjugation, has looser notions of tense, has no direct/indirect article, uses glyphs instead of an alphabet, can be read top to bottom, right to left, left to right and doesn't use spaces to delimit words. That's even before we talk about tones or the highly monosyllabic nature of the language alters things like memorisation. (ever notice how Chinese people are often good at memorising numbers?)