I have a second cousin who is now only three, going on to four years old. Since the vocabulary she knows is limited, she sometimes has to use the superordinate-level category and feature theory of object recognition to name objects. Superordinate-level category of object recognition is when someone is naming objects they see in a more general term. For instance, instead of naming an object by its name, someone recognizes it by the category it is in. Feature theory of object recognition is when people recognize objects by remembering different features and parts of the object, and when they see the same features again in another object, they assume the two objects is the same thing.
Toddlers and children tend to do this when they have not enough words and experience stored in their head. When my second cousin sees something she has never seen before she uses the feature theory at times, naming objects the wrong name. For instance, when she first saw a tiger, she called it a big cat because they basically have the same features except tigers are bigger in size. Although tigers are under the cat category, she only calls it cat because it looks like a bigger cat for her.
Another example is when she was drawing a picture on newspapers once, she asked me to hand her the “pens.” She was pointing to her crayons at that time. This is not only an example of feature theory, because crayons and pens do look alike, but also an example of structural description theory. When she named crayons as pens because she knew them not only as having the similar features as pens, but also they have similar functions.
Both the examples of misnaming the tigers and crayons are also examples of superordinate-level category of recognizing objects as well. Because my second cousin is naming tigers as their general category- cats, and naming crayons in its general category- pens, this shows that she is using this concept of superordinate-level or object recognition.