If you would have to name one uniquely human ability, language would likely be an excellent contender. The fact that you are interpreting the patterns on this page and reading the thoughts of another human being is nothing short of amazing. This project aims to study how communication systems emerge as multiple people gradually agree on shared behaviours, and novel languages move from mind to mind. Language-like signals emerge spontaneously in the laboratory when people are asked to communicate through a medium that is linguistically novel to them. When laboratory languages are transmitted from person to person, features of language structure gradually appear. Such experimental methods provide a window into the mechanisms that were likely involved in the early emergence of human language. This project investigates how meaning and structure unfold over time using two suitable test cases. The first case is in the domain of embodied language, where signals have an obvious and clear connection to physical experience: sign language patterns for talking about tools. The second case investigates a more intangible and abstract domain of experience: patterns for talking about time. I will employ various novel methods to study the emergence of these patterns and unravel the essential mechanisms involved and their contribution over time. Laboratory experiments will be used to simulate language emergence with human participants, online crowdsourcing experiments will be conducted to map out people’s cognitive biases on a large scale and novel tools will be developed for quantitative analysis of 3D body tracking data. This will not only open up new ways to run and analyse laboratory experiments in the field of language evolution, a field that increasingly focuses on the gestural modality, but will additionally benefit the fields of gesture and sign language research in general.