Dr. Pimsleur was one of the world's foremost experts in applied linguistics. He taught French phonetics and phonemics at UCLA after obtaining his Ph.D. in French and a master's degree in psychological statistics from Columbia University. After leaving UCLA, Pimsleur went on to faculty positions at Ohio State and SUNY at Albany, where he held dual professorships in Education and French.
His research focused on language acquisition, especially the organic learning that takes place as children learn to speak their native language. He discovered how to select and organize the materials of the second language to fit the one way that the stream of speech of an unknown language can enter the consciousness of the adult and be processed through the language learning power of the human brain.
He applied the results of his research on the acquisition process to second-language learning and the results became the Pimsleur Language Learning Method.