That might not even be a Whorfian effect. Perhaps the act of learning the word for a color involves spending time looking at the color, as well as practice at identifying it, so you prime your visual system in a way that could happen even without language. I propose that if you gave someone wordless practice with a color (for example by asking them to sort objects) they would see all of the same time improvements.
To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.
I don't think it does it well. Compare the Russians to someone who does the task regularly in English, say a graphic designer. My guess is the differences will go away when you compare someone who practices it regularly to them.
