In 1973, Duane and Sue Rumbaugh at the Yerkes Institute for Primate Studies, began a study with three chimpanzees: Lana, Sherman and Austin. They tried to train these chimps in such a way as to approximate the conditions in which children learn and refine language use.  They created a new language known as "Yerkish".  The words were composed of nine arbitrary elements which, when combined created specific words or lexigrams. Rather
than have plastic chips, the words, or lexigrams, were geometric shapes on a computer keyboard. (1) Each lexigram had only one meaning, thereby eliminating the ambiguity of human language.  What was important in the Lana experiment, was that the order of the lexigrams was significant as is word order in human grammar. (2)
 
 
 
 

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(1) An Introduction to Language pg. 403
(2) Progress in Ape Research pg. 81