121. Read the following passage, then answer the question below.

Does the language you speak shape the way you think? The idea is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after the linguists Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, who argued in the early twentieth century that speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. In its strong version, called linguistic determinism, language limits thought: what cannot be said cannot be thought. Few researchers today accept this version, since people can obviously grasp ideas for which they have no single word, such as the German feeling of schadenfreude, which English speakers understand perfectly well.

A weaker version, linguistic relativity, claims that language influences habits of thought without controlling them, and it has found modest support. Russian, for example, has separate basic words for light blue and dark blue, whereas English uses one word, blue, for both. In experiments, Russian speakers were slightly faster at telling apart two shades when they fell on opposite sides of that boundary, but the advantage disappeared when participants were asked to repeat a string of digits while looking at the colors, which suggests that language was helping them only when it could be used silently. Another line of research concerns languages that describe positions using compass directions, like north and south, rather than left and right. Speakers of such languages, who must always track their orientation, perform remarkably well at keeping track of direction, even in unfamiliar places.

Critics argue that such effects are small and might arise from culture rather than grammar, since people who speak the same language share customs as well. The most defensible position today is that language does not imprison thought, but may nudge attention toward some distinctions rather than others, especially when we are making quick judgments.

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