Takano Y
Cognition. 1989 Mar;31(2):141-62. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(89)90021-8.
Bloom (1981) tested a weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (i.e., "Language affects thinking though it does not determine thinking") in a series of cross-cultural experiments. According to Bloom, Chinese lacks two linguistic devices that are present in English and supposed to be critical in performing theoretical thinking. It was found that the Chinese subjects were outperformed by American counterparts in all the tests designed to assess the ability of theoretical thinking. The results were taken as evidence for the weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. A methodological consideration has revealed, however, that all of his experiments except one are uninterpretable because of the lack of necessary control conditions. In addition, three experiments in the present study have demonstrated that the findings in Bloom's sole interpretable experiment were artifacts due to a methodological flaw. Further theoretical considerations reveal the inadequacy of Bloom's basic methodology and the limitation in the effects of linguistic relativity that may be possible at least theoretically.
布鲁姆（1981）在一系列跨文化实验中检验了语言相对论假设的一个较弱版本（即“语言影响思维，尽管它并不决定思维”）。根据布鲁姆的观点，中文缺乏英语中存在的两种语言手段，而这两种手段被认为对进行理论思维至关重要。研究发现，在所有旨在评估理论思维能力的测试中，中国受试者的表现都不如美国受试者。这些结果被视为语言相对论假设较弱版本的证据。然而，一项方法学考量表明，他所有的实验（除了一个）由于缺乏必要的控制条件而无法解读。此外，本研究中的三个实验表明，布鲁姆唯一可解读的实验结果是由于方法学缺陷而产生的假象。进一步的理论思考揭示了布鲁姆基本方法的不足，以及至少在理论上可能存在的语言相对论效应的局限性。
