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Usage-based theories see language as a complex adaptive system: the interaction between history the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next and human psychology the set of unique social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place. I will argue that findings from language acquisition research, typology, and psycholinguistics are converging on the idea that language is fundamentally built out of use and generalizations over those usage events. Interestingly, none of the fundamental mechanisms of the usage-based approach are required to be a language-specific adaptation. Language shows creativity, categories, and recursion because people think creatively, categorically, and recursively. I will discuss a range of experimental, corpus and observational work showing that understanding the developmental of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control, categorization and social-reasoning.