AbstractPoor language skills are associated with numerous negative outcomes ranging from higher rates of tantrumsand difficulty developing friendships to school failure contact with the justice system and increased victimization.Although language deficits may be noticed as early as toddlerhood effective treatment may not begin this earlyand there is relatively little time to close the language gap before these children are faced with the increasedlanguage demands of formal education and the cumulative effects of academic struggle. For the 7-13% ofchildren with impaired language skills language treatments that are faster and more effective are urgentlyneeded. This competing renewal addresses this need with a series of studies that translate basic research instatistical learning to treatment contexts. The Statistical Learning Framework posits children extract wordmeaning and grammatical structure from the distributional information contained in the language input theyreceive and accounts for rapid implicit language learning. The proposed studies take an experimental approachin which theoretically-motivated treatment factors are tested in two groups of children with poor language skills.Late Talkers are children (ages 2-3 years) who are identified by their very limited number of vocabulary wordsthat they know and use. Preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (ages 4-5 years) showmarked deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes. We will directly address the issue of non-responders (i.e.children who make limited improvement despite treatment that is effective for others) a problem inherent to alltreatment research. We leverage our previous findings to predict early in the treatment process which childrenare highly likely to be non-responders and propose an alternative treatment method that might be better suitedto this subset of children. These studies represent the necessary work for principled language treatment that issupported by evidence and can provide insights into the nature of learning in a range of children with poorlanguage skills.