Here is an interesting 2010 New York Times article summarizing some scientific research on how language shapes how we think.

From the article:

The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

Edit: I've just realized that me opening a closely related discussion here might reduce the odds of you getting the particular answer you seek, sorry! To avoid this I've expanded the comment into an article here and edited it away.

The closest I could find is Word usage misconceptions among first‐year university physics students - which isn't exactly what you are looking for (but may have pointers to better terminology?)

This study compared students’ perceived understanding of commonplace physics terminology with their actual understanding of it. First‐year university physics students were presented with a list of sentences containing 25 selected words which are lay terms, but which have specific meanings in physics discourse. A first test required them to identify whether or not they thought they understood the meanings of the given words. This test was followed directly by another which diagnosed their actual understanding of each term. Comparisons of scores showed that the average student tested had an inadequate grasp of the meaning of more than 15 of those words that he/she had professed to understand. It is surmised that this high degree of self‐delusion about the meaning of terms could be a significant obstacle in physics instruction.

You could check with the General Semantics folks to see if they know of actual studies that confirm the efficacy of any of their recommendations on language usage.

How to limit clinical errors in interpretation of data [PDF]

Patricia Wright, Carel Jansen, Jeremy C. Wyatt

The Lancet: Volume 352, Issue 9139, 7 November 1998, Pages 1539–1543

Text entries in medical records must be succinct, but must also avoid ambiguity. The note, “Pain in left knee—not sitting” may be concise and clear to the writer, but to other readers it could mean that the pain disappears when the patient sits or that, because of pain, the patient is not sitting. If, while entering data, writers anticipate the needs of readers, there can be benefits in speed and accuracy for future users, including the original writer.

Ambiguities can also arise with quantifiers such as “sometimes” or “often”, because these convey different meanings to patients and clinicians, with patients tending to attribute higher frequencies. Ambiguity is lessened if frequency is explicitly specified—for example, as “once a month”. Similarly, use of illdefined words (eg, large, likely) to quantify size or probability, is best avoided. The different >interpretation by doctors of alternative, equivalent measures of drug efficacy, such as absolute and relative difference, is a further warning that words matter.

Thanks for the Chalmers reference. Digression (feel free to ignore it if too off-topic): do you credit much probability to Chalmers's "key thesis discussed in the previous chapter: that all truths are analytically scrutable from truths involving primitive concepts"?

People doing research on dyslexia or other learning disorder symptoms (like the overly literal interpretations that autistic people have) might have found something interesting. Dyslexia isn't just a reading problem, they can also make characteristic mistakes when speaking and listening to words. Learning disorder research is not quite directly applicable to the average population (though I read somewhere that 1 in 6 has a learning disorder) but doing something like searching for the words to describe dyslexic errors might lead you to interesting places.