Lana Project - 1971-1976

By Duane Rumbaugh, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and William Fields
World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation
(UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, University of California Press; 2005)

Lana is a female chimpanzee born in 1970 at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Her name derives from the LANguage Analogue (LANA) project, which sought to develop a computer-based language training system in an effort to investigate the ability of chimpanzees to acquire language. Lana joined the research as a subject when she was two and a half years old. The research was the first to interface a keyboard with a chimpanzee. At that time, it was believed that only humans could use symbols.

Lana demonstrated that she could discriminate between lexigrams and associate them with ideas. As she progressed, she would sequence words and use them grammatically, later starting to create novel utterances in response to unplanned events that affected her life. For example, Lana would request that the research technician refill her computer vending device when it was empty of treats, or request an item she had seen outside her room that the computer had no facility to provide to her. Lana exhibited language learning, and her experimental accomplishments were extraordinary. Equally important to her legacy is the lexigram keyboard, developed by Duane Rumbaugh, which has served as the primary communicative interface for ape language research at Decatur, Georgia for the last several decades. This keyboard is composed of three panels with approximately 384 noniconic arbitrary symbols. When the apes depress a key, the word represented there is spoken by a digital voice and the lexigram is displayed on a video screen.