I wonder how this relates to the results of the white room experiment? In that experiment you take a rat and put it in the center of a rectangular room with white walls, and you put a treat the rat wants in one corner, and let the rat see it. You then turn the rat around a few times to disorient and release it.
The rat then tries to get the treat. 50% of the time it goes straight to the correct side of the room, and 50% of the time it goes to the wrong side first.
If instead of an all white room you do it in a room where one of the long walls is painted blue--the results are the same. Half the time the rat goes to the correct corner first, half the time it goes to the wrong corner first.
That's interesting because other experiments show that rats can recognize blue vs. white and can recognize left vs. right. But apparently they cannot put the concept of blue vs. white and concept of left vs. right together to remember that something is on the left side of the blue wall.
If you try this with human adults, they of course go right to the treat almost every time. We have no trouble remembering the goody is on the left side of the blue wall.
Babies, though...nope. No better than rats. Two year olds...still no better than rats. Same for three and four and five year olds. It isn't until a human is around six years old that they can go straight for the treat.
The scientists in the story I heard on the radio talking about this (probably on Radiolab on NPR) had a hypothesis about what is going on.
Before around six the spatial language used by kids is not very sophisticated. They would not say that something is "on the left side of the blue wall". Around six their language is developed enough that they would say something like that, and that is the same time they start being able to beat rats in the experiment.
The scientists suspect that the rats and the younger kids have the concepts of color and of relative position in their brains and they can apply them, but there are no links between them. When the kids get sophisticated enough that they start composing phrases like "left of the blue wall" that links the relative position concepts and the color concepts, and then they can use the combination of color and position to remember things.
This is not quite like Sapir-Whorf, because it doesn't necessarily mean that the kids can start thinking about "left of the blue wall" BECAUSE their language has developed to the point it can express it. It could just as easily be the other way around--they add that capability to their language BECAUSE they became able to think about it.