Three children with autism were taught to identify pictures of emotions in response to their spoken names. Their speed of acquisition was compared using a within-child alternating treatments design across three teaching conditions, each involving a 5 second delay to reinforcement. In the marked-before condition, an instruction encouraged the children to visually orient to the cards before they made their choice response; in the marked-after condition, an attention-eliciting verbal cue (e.g., “Look!”) was delivered after both correct and incorrect responses; in the delay condition, these marking cues were omitted. Performance in the no-cue control was inferior to both the marked-before and marked-after conditions, but the difference between the latter two conditions was not significant.
