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This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children’s learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (ApAA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (ApAB). The children in ApAA rarely produced the plural. The children in ApAB supplied the singular form of A but children in ApAA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in ApAA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speaking children (learning a language without a mandatory plural) supplied the singular form of A but the English-speaking children did not. The findings indicate young children learning English know there is a plural to be learned BEFORE they have fully worked out the rules of production or acquired the necessary singular–plural pairs for broad generalization. Language learning is often conceptualized as a mapping problem. There are meanings and there are forms and the learner must link the right meaning t