I suppose that depends on what you mean by "perceiving objects." 
I suspect that perception isn't affected, nor behavior (directly), as experiments such as Li et al.have shown, as you pointed out.
However, it may influence behaviors and responses indirectly through associations with other words (as your citation of Boroditsky et al. showed) as well as emotional valence. As indirect evidence of the latter claim, I'd cite the wide body of evidence of cognitive behavioral therapy and its effect on emotion by changing discursive thought patterns. And through changes in emotional valence, behavioral changes may follow.
Beyond that, however, I'm afraid I don't have much to add. However, this is a topic I'm actively reading about as it strongly interests me, so perhaps I'll have something more solid to say about it soon. But I really appreciate your through and evidence-based post. If anybody has experimental studies that demonstrate the effect of language changes (within a language) on emotional valence or activating strong associations with other words, I'd be thrilled for some references to read!

Just as music is commonly thought of as a universal language, the reverse is also true:  language is very much like music.
They are both strongly tied with our emotions. To understand the similarity between music and language it is best to be well versed in at least two languages, but it can be illustrated with a few simple examples. Since I am a native of Argentina, let?s use Spanish and English, and for a word let?s use ?bomb? (?bomba? in Spanish).
In Spanish, ?bomba? can also be a water pump (bomba de agua) or a pastry (bomba de crema). Your fireman is a ?bombero? (he pumps water). Therefore, if you are out in the countryside and somebody wants to show you their bomba, you think of water. If you are in the city you may be in the mood for a bomba de crema (cream puff). However, if you are in New York City you?ll probably think of a building being blown up. In English, the word ?bomb? conjures up explosions, so you react immediately when you hear it. But in Spanish you wait to see if an adjective is coming to further refine or explain what you are talking about, so your reaction is gentler, or at least not as immediate.
Surprisingly, Spanish is also gentler with another act of violence. In English, when you hear that somebody was shot, you will probably think of a dead or bleeding man, a violent scene. In Spanish, however, the word is ?baleado? (bulleted), somehow not so bad.
It?s the difference between listening to Beethoven?s 9th Symphony performed by a full orchestra, or just played on your solo guitar? You may be saying the same thing, but the experience is different.

Hi Philosophus,
Good point on what I mean by "perceiving objects".  This could mean a lot of different things, from the very character of the perceptual experience itself, to the way we later categorize things in our mind when we think about objects generally, to connotations or associations we have with those objects. Interestingly (and perhaps counterintuitively), some experiments seem to show that color discrimination itself is affected by language.  For example, in this study, the researchers tested how quickly English-speakers vs. how quickly Russian-speakers could answer the question of which two patches of blue were the exact same shade as a third patch of blue on the screen. The thing is, while in English, the word "blue" picks out many different colors ranging from light blue to dark blue, there is no equivalent to the word "blue" in Russian.  Russian has one word for what we call light blue and a different one for dark blue.  It turned out that the Russian speakers were actually faster in getting the right answer on the task when the stimuli crossed the light blue/dark blue border (as in, one patch would fall under the light blue term in Russian and the other under the dark blue) than in cases in which both patches were on the light blue spectrum or both patches were on the dark blue spectrum.  But for English speakers, there was no difference no matter where on the spectrum the patches fell.  Somehow, the Russian speakers could more easily discriminate certain shades of blue than English speakers.  But the only difference is the language they speak!
Here are some things you might be interested in reading:
Lera Boroditsky has some very accessible work in the popular press.  For copies of those articles as well as her academic ones, you can visit her website.
Lila Gleitman also has a career's worth of excellent work on the subject, you can look at her work on her website here.  I recommend her recent handbook entry, written with Anna Papafragou: Relations between language and thought.
John McWhorter has a recent book called The Language Hoax: why the world looks the same in any language, defending the view that language affects our perception of things very little.
I don't know if these are exactly what you are looking for, but I hope they are enjoyable and informative nonetheless. Happy reading!

Hi Lito,
Interesting point. While perhaps Spanish speakers and English speakers concepts of bombs or shooting are not different, their associations with the words are.  It would be interesting to study whether this affects, on a wide scale, how Spanish speaking people and English speaking react in situations involving bombings or shooting (I'm not sure whether people have studied this).
Something that comes to mind that is closely related to this point: a lot of political vocabulary is chosen especially to elicit certain emotions, for example calling the very same law "Obamacare" vs. "The Affordable Care Act". It seems that people react to the very same law in different ways depending on what it is called. 
 

I've read some books on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It should be noted that Sapir and Whorf didn't support the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So, it is a bit unfair to name it after them, even as Whorf sometimes used strong language in defense of the theory.

Anyway, there are certain areas of language that, in research, do indicate that the strong version might be justified in some cases. Language does seem able to determine maybe a few key parts of thought, perception, and behavior. I forget the examples off hand. They can be found in the books I own, but it would be a chore to dig them out.

That said, such examples would be rare since more often language is simply one factor among many in shaping and influencing us.

I don't know what sorts of empirical evidence exist to support this. Anecdotally, there are numerous accounts of disagreement or misunderstanding, when "something gets lost" in translation. This might lead to a belief that meanings generally recognized in one language are not necessarily the same in another. But this may not, probably does not, account for differences in culture, tradition, or other social factors, not arising directly from language structure itself. Languages are diverse in complexity: Hawaiian has fewer than ten (?) letters, not counting the vowels used in English. So, can/could/does language affect thought? I don't have enough empirical evidence. But, anecdotally, there are clues. Sounds like a good project for a thesis or dissertation? Or has it already been done?