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This is a hot topic of debate, so my answer will be an incomplete one. There are actually two separate questions here. One is on language and the other one is on environment. Language: My answer is no; different languages do not limit the conceptual repository of human mind. The current ongoing debate is partially on the Pirahã language. Everett studied ...

I think it is likely the case. I agree that the idea of a "mirror neuron" is a bit dubious, as it implies that the function of those neurons are related to mirroring. It's probably the case that they represent the actual movement, and their activation in witnessing the action is tangential to that. As for your question, research was done on this exact ...

One thing that comes to mind is the discussion over why English-speaking people think submarines cannot swim, while they think airplanes can fly. Supposedly in Russian, though, they do refer to submarines as "swimming." Meanwhile, we ask whether computers can think, without really realizing that this question turns out to be simply a question about ...

Yes, there's been scientific tests. No, they did not support the propositions. However, some supporters of the propositions argue that existing empirical tests have methodological problems. There's a discussion of scientific evaluation for NLP on wikipedia that cites several review articles. Quoting the Heap (1988) review as quoted in Wikipedia: ...

To use "mirror neurons" explain why people enjoy watching porn is problematic when you consider that people (a least men, Cerny and Janssen, 2011) seem to enjoy watching porn where the actors are solely of the opposite sex. That is, people seem to be enjoying watching porn (or even looking at erotic pictures) when there is nothing really to mirror. As the ...

Taking @BenCole's suggestion on the bolded parts... how the human mind creates and perpetuates the idea of knowing something I think the philosophic response to this is "What does it mean to know something?". I'd recommend Searle's Chinese Room argument [1] and the many rebuttals to it (which include some computational explanations of understanding) to ...

I'm not sure what you mean by cognitive capacity, but I absolutely believe that language shapes the way we think. The collective nouns, verbs, and phrases of a language are the categories by which a culture interprets things. Consider seizures. Our culture may call them seizures, and a doctor might posit that their cause is epilepsy (or something). That's ...