In linguistic interactions humans do more than share propositions and convey semantic meaning; they also structure their contributions to foreground, background, and emphasise different elements in their message, and they convey social meanings in the form, rather than the content, of their utterances. Information is a crucial component in understanding both these phenomena. In this talk I present two different experimental studies investigating the role of information in meaning making. The first employs a referential communication game to investigate the emergence of information structure and focus-like behaviour in a simple visual communication system. The second employs an artificial language learning task to investigate the role of novelty and surprisal in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. Aside from the empirical questions answered, these studies showcase the role of “laboratory language” tasks in understanding meaning and structure in natural language.