One claim, made at two strengths

1. Linguistic determinism is the strong claim that language fixes thought.
2. Linguistic relativism is the weaker claim that language only influences thought.

Linguistic determinism, the strong claim

1. On this account your language does not merely describe your world, it sets the limits of it.
2. If your language has no word or grammatical structure for an idea, then that idea is not available to you as a thought.
3. Two people raised in very different languages would therefore be living in genuinely different mental worlds.

Strengths and weaknesses of linguistic determinism

1. One strength is that it makes a sharp, testable prediction, that speakers cannot make a distinction their language does not mark.
2. A second strength is that it forced psychologists to take seriously how differently languages carve up the world, which opened up cross-cultural research.
3. One weakness is that you can plainly think about things you have no single word for, so thought is not sealed inside your vocabulary.
4. A second weakness is that babies think before they have any language at all, which the strong claim cannot accommodate.

Linguistic relativism, the weaker claim

1. Relativism keeps the direction of cause but drops the absolute part of the claim.
2. Having a ready-made word or a habitual way of phrasing something makes that idea quicker to reach for and easier to hold on to.
3. Nothing is made impossible, so a speaker can still learn a distinction their language does not usually mark.

Strengths and weaknesses of linguistic relativism

1. One strength is that speakers of different languages answer the same questions at measurably different speeds, and response time is recorded by machine rather than judged.
2. A second strength is that it fits the obvious fact that people learn second languages and new ideas.
3. One weakness is that the differences found are measured in fractions of a second, so how much they matter in real life is open to argument.
4. A second weakness is that language is hard to separate from culture, so the language itself may not be what is causing the difference.

Evidence from speakers of Mandarin and English

1. English mostly lays time out horizontally, in words such as before and after.
2. Mandarin also lays time out vertically, using words that mean up and down.
3. Boroditsky (2001) found that English speakers answered purely time-based questions faster after a horizontal prime, while Mandarin speakers answered them faster after a vertical prime.
4. The Mandarin speakers showed this even though every one of them was tested in English, which points to a habit of thought carried over from their first language.
5. The difference showed up in how fast each group answered, not in whether they could answer at all, so the finding supports relativism and not determinism.

Turning this into marks

1. Saying that language affects thought is not enough, so state whether it fixes thought or only influences it.
2. Quote Boroditsky's priming result and say which of the two claims it supports.
3. The mark most often lost comes from writing about only one of the two claims when the question names both.