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The linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality, forms one part of the broader question of how language influences thought. Despite long-standing historical interest in the hypothesis, there is relatively little empirical research directly addressing it. Existing empirical approaches are classified into three types. 1. Structure-centered approaches begin with language differences and ask about their implications for thought. 2. Domain-centered approaches begin with experienced reality and ask how different languages encode it. 3. Behavior-centered approaches begin with some practical concern and seek an explanation in language. These approaches are compared, and recent methodological improvements highlighted. Despite empirical advances, a theoretical account needs to articulate exactly how languages interpret experiences and how those interpretations influence thought. This will entail integrating theory and data concerning both the general relation of language and thought and the shaping influence of specific discursive structures and practices.

The current state of research on language and thought using color as a stimulus is reviewed. Five related experiments that integrate and expand the findings of this previous color research are reported. The relationship between memory and (1) color stimuli discriminability, (2) focality, (3) two‐person communication accuracy, (4) group communication accuracy, and (5) referential confusability is assessed. What we discover is that the color array previously used to demonstrate the influence of focality on memory is discriminatively biased in favor of focal chips. Results show that when perceptual discriminability is controlled for, the various linguistic indices are better predictors of memory accuracy in both short‐term and long‐term recognition memory tasks than is focality. Memory for color stimuli seems to be mediated by basic color descriptions, which may include, but are not restricted to, basic color terms. The discussion takes up the implications of the findings for previous research and for Whorf's hierarchical view of the relationship between language and sublinguistic universale. [Whorfian hypothesis, language and thought, color terminology, memory, culture theory]