Relates to the view that children bring a battery of socio-cognitive skills to the language acquisition process and is advocated by developmental psycholinguists who take an emergentism perspective. These cognitive skills are domain-general: they are not specific to language, but relate to a range of cognitive domains.

According to cognitive linguists such as Michael Tomasello these skills facilitate the ability of humans to acquire language. There are two kinds of general cognitive ability that facilitate the acquisition of language: pattern-finding ability and intention-reading ability.