Here we describe a simulation in the form of a game of how a child learns to use language as it learns about its world. The central idea is that language is acquired in the context of nonlinguistic information, that pragmatic, lexical, and syntactic information processing work together. Playing the game takes only about an hour or less. In our experience, we have found that it is a very good way to convey a sense of the problems and strategies involved in language learning and teaching. Necessarily, an hour's experience cannot capture every aspect of a process that takes years to complete. There are shortcomings of the simulation, for example, that adults already know that linguistic signals are meaningful whereas a baby must discover this fact. Nevertheless, we highly recommend that readers experience the game. A simplified version is presented here. Modifications are easy to add for research or entertainment purposes.

The game is played by one or more teams of two players each. Competition requires at least two teams but the game may be played by a single pair. Each team represents a family, a baby player and a parent player. Initially the parent player is informed as to the lexicon and syntax of a simple artificial language while the baby player remains naive. The object of the game is to have the baby player learn the language and achieve competence sooner than the babies of other families.