The acquisition of subject properties in adult instructed L2 English by Spanish speakers still constitutes an area of difficulty, especially in situations of minimal exposure where explicit teaching of the syntax of subjects rarely occurs. By exploring the L2 learners’ intuitions and corrections of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing subject properties, this article contributes new cross-sectional data from adult learners at three stages of L2 development: beginners, intermediate, and advanced groups. The data show initial L1 transfer and subsequent developmental progress. Yet results are clearly not target-like even among advanced learners, which suggests that adult learners do not resort to parameter-resetting in instructed L2A and necessarily apply general learning mechanisms to adopt L2 structures with feature specifications different from those of their L1.
