The fundamental human capacity for learning a language has long been of interest to linguists, psychologists and neurologists alike. We take it for granted that any infant, in only a few years’ time, will master at least the basics of a highly complex symbolic system. But how children accomplish this remarkable feat remains a mystery. Not only does building artificial systems with the same capability for language remain out of reach despite decades of phenomenal advances in computing, it is also far from obvious how this could be done. How is it, then, that we learn to communicate?