In this talk I will discuss my experimental, corpus and modelling work exploring the social and cognitive foundations of language acquisition. In an approach that can be described as developmental cognitive linguistics I aim to show (a) how cognitive bottlenecks can place adaptive constraints on learning and (b) the value-added of integrating social and cognitive development into our models of language development. Examples are drawn from such non-linguistic domains as inhibition, memory, attention, and categorisation to illustrative how their development can shape the course of language acquisition.