Past efforts to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis have suffered from a failure to separate language from a specific cultural context, so that it has been impossible to decide whether certain aspects of personality exhibited by members of a language/culture group should be attributed to the influence of language, of culture, or of both. To rectify this problem, this experiment took a number of children and raised them in rigidly controlled identical cultural environments, but exposed each group to a different language. The culture chosen was standard US Midwestern farm life, except that the children were not allowed contact with anyone but the experimenters. This culture was considered fairly bland and middle-of-the-road, so that any deviations resulting from language would be obvious. A control group was raised in an English speaking environment, while four test groups were raised speaking standard varieties of French, German, Latin, and Khoisan, respectively.

Baek (1983) is a well-known ethnographic survey comparing typical characteristics of members of a number of language/culture groups around the globe. Its data, reproduced in part below, served as a basis for comparing characteristics of the subjects with characteristics of native speakers who were also exposed to native cultures.

Language/Culture	Typical Characteristics
Midwest US	friendly, boring
French	romantic, obnoxious
German	efficient, aggressive
Classical Latin	pragmatic, imperialistic
Khoisan	peaceful, xenophobic

The subjects were raised from birth in their experimental environments. At the age of eighteen, the members of each group were evaluated by a team of expert psychologists, who determined that the members of the groups displayed the following traits, respectively.

Language	Typical Characteristics
US English	friendly, boring
French	friendly, boring
German	friendly, boring
Classical Latin	friendly, boring
Khoisan	friendly, boring

The experimental results clearly show that culture rather than language is the key factor in determining national characteristics. Thus, the attractive notions that French are romantic because their language sounds romantic, that German are aggressive because their language is full of shouting and spitting, and similar theories for other languages are not born out by the factual data.

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