Abstract

The study describes the dyadic and dynamic assessment model of an early intervention program, called INTERACT (Bonifacio and Hvastja Stefani, 2004). It is specifically structured for "late talkers" children (LT) between 24 and 30 months of age, so assessed according to clinic and linguistic criteria. The intervention is centered on the communicative and interactive characteristics of the parent-child dyad. INTERACT program includes 24 strategies that are taught to parents during clinical practice with the purpose of promoting changes in the parent-child communicative style and encouraging improvements in the expressive language skills of the child. The study analyses the communicative styles of two mother-LT son dyads before and after INTERACT intervention and describes the ways by which the intervention was individualized and applied for each dyad.