Lana (chimpanzee)

Lana (born on October 7 1970) is a female chimpanzee, the first to be used in language research using lexigrams. She was born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre of Emory University, and the project she was allocated to when 1 year old, the LANguage Analogue project led by Duane Rumbaugh, was named after her with the acronym LANA because the project team felt that her identity was well worth preserving (Rumbaugh, 1977, p. XXI).

The researchers stated Lana showed that she could discriminate between lexigrams, sequence words grammatically and make novel utterances, demonstrating language learning.

The first LANA project (1971) officially had two Principal Investigators, Duane Rumbaugh and Ernst von Glasersfeld (cf. NIH grants HD-06016 and RR-00165). Ernst von Glasersfeld developed the language that Lana learned to use: he coined the term "lexigram", created the first 120 of them and designed the grammar that regulated their combination. This artificial language was called Yerkish, in honor of Robert M. Yerkes, the founder of the laboratory within which the LANA project was conceived and conducted.