The key is social cognition.

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Brain Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition (2010, background): “Theories of social learning have traditionally emphasized the role of social factors in language acquisition (Bruner, 1983; Vygotsky, 1962; Tomasello, 2003a, 2003b).”
Socio-Pragmatics and Attention: Contributions to Gesturally Guided Word Learning in Toddlers (2008, background): “…children have a rather sophisticated understanding of the referential intent of a variety of sociopragmatic cues from a very early age, and that little more than this knowledge is necessary to learn new words in the natural course of experience (e.g., Tomasello, 1992, 2003; Tomasello et al., 2007).”
Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain? (2007, background): “Shared perception of communicative intentions, which emerges at around 9 months of age, has been argued to be crucial for the acquisition of language (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1998; Tomasello, 2003a, 2003b).”
Time to Give Up the Dogmas of Attribution (2011, background): “The human recognition that there is mind behind behavior is one of most consequential evolutionary advances, on par with language and probably preceding it (Malle, 2002a; Tomasello, 2003).”
The emergence of music from the Theory of Mind (2009, background): “Tomasello (1999) argues that a ToM is essential for symbolism, where symbolic representations are thought to arise through collaborative problem solving referred to as joint-attentional activities (Tomasello, 2003).”