Explain Sapir-Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis. Provide some evidence supporting this hypothesis. What are the challenges that the hypothesis faces?

Explain Sapir-Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis. Provide some evidence supporting this hypothesis. What are the challenges that the hypothesis faces?

Sapir-Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis concludes that the nature od a culture's language can affect the way people think.

One of the experiment to prove it was done by Jonathan Winawer compared the way Russian-speaking and English-speaking participants discriminate between different shades of blue. What he has done was that he give participant three blue squares and was asked to pick the square on the bottom that matches color of the square on top. On some of trials, bottom squares were from the same Russian category and on others from different. The result showed that Russian-speaking participants responded more quickly when categories were different, but there were no difference between the responses of English-participants answers. It happened because Russian language distinguish between "goloboy" and "siniy", two different shades of blue. English language doesn't. The result therefore support the Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis.

The Sapir-Whorf's lingistic relativity hypothesis proposes that "the nature of one's language can affect the way people think".

Evidence for this theory is provided by the results of an experiment which studied how English-speaking and Russian-speaking participants differed in performance on a color discrimination task.
In Russian there are two types of blue: 'siniy' and 'goloboy' which are dark blue and light blue respectively.

The participants were presented with 3 blue squares, two of which differed in shade. Their task was to, as quickly as possible, pick the one of the bottom squares that was the same color as the top square.
The findings indicated that the Russian-speaking participants made their choice quicker than the English speaking ones (who have only one word for blue) when the bottom squares came from two different categories (when one was siniy and the other goloboy).
This shows that having different categories in one's language makes it easier to differentiate between categories (even ones that seem to identical to people who speak a different language).

Other evidence is given by a study that showed that color identification is quicker when stimuli is presented to the right visual field which is managed by the left hemisphere of the brain (which is also the hemisphere responsible for language).