Lana | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1970-10-07)October 7, 1970 |
| Died | November 2016 (aged 45–46) |
Lana (October 7, 1970 - November, 2016) was a femalechimpanzee, the first to uselexigrams in language research. She was born at theYerkes National Primate Research Center ofEmory 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.[1]
The researchers stated that Lana could discriminate between lexigrams, sequence words grammatically and make novel utterances, demonstrating language learning.
The first LANA project (1971) officially had two Principal Investigators, Rumbaugh andErnst 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 calledYerkish, in honor ofRobert M. Yerkes, the founder of the laboratory within which the LANA project was conceived and conducted.
The early project also had several graduate-student researchers. The prime researcher, and the prime worker with Lana was Dr. Timothy V. Gill. Included in the project were graduate students Gwen Bell Dooley, Beverly Wilkerson, and Michael D. Haberman, among others. Gwen Bell Dooley demonstrated Lana's cognitive capability to distinguish between two numerical sets of objects which she then labelled with either "more" or "less", whichever was requested.