Paul Pimsleur was one of the world's experts in applied linguistics. He taught French phonetics and phonemics at University of California, Los Angeles after obtaining his Ph.D. in French from Columbia University.
His research was focused into understanding the language acquisition process, especially the organic learning of children that speak a language without knowing its formal structure. For this, he studied the learning process of groups made of children, adults, and multilingual adults. The result of this research was the Pimsleur language learning system.
