By studying communicative interactions between humans, we can investigate the basic processes underlying the evolution of language, including how humans manage to communicate in the first place, how they form novel conventions, how they create grammatical structure, and subsequent changes to their conventions and grammar. Communication experiments, which involve interactions between two or more human participants in artificial settings, are a useful method for addressing these questions within a controlled environment. These experiments can help researchers with teasing apart the effects of different variables on the emergence of language, which are typically confounded in naturalistic settings. In this chapter, we first briefly review the history of communication paradigms. We then summarize the procedures, designs, and typical measures that characterize communication experiments. Finally, we discuss the theoretical limitations and methodological challenges of using such paradigms and propose some ways forward.