Role: Author

Dr. Paul Pimsleur devoted his life to language teaching and testing and was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. He was fluent in French, good in German, and had a working knowledge of Italian, Russian, Modern Greek, and Mandarin Chinese. After obtaining his Ph.D. in French and a Masters in Psychology from Columbia University, he taught French Phonetics and Linguistics at UCLA. He later became Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, and Director of The Listening Center (a state-wide language lab) at Ohio State University; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at the State University of New York at Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. He did research on the psychology of language learning and in 1969 was Section Head of Psychology of Second Language Learning at the International Congress of Applied Linguistics. \

Dr. Svajian attended both Armenian and Turkish schools in his native city and is conversant with both languages. By the time Dr. Stephen G. Svajian came to the United States with his family in 1923, he had already lived through two wars and witnessed the brutal massacre that took the lives of most of Turkey's Armenian population. After earning his B.S. and D.D.S. degrees at New York University, he practiced dentistry in Brooklyn until 1943, when he entered the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant. He served as a combat medical officer with the Fourth Infantry Division in Normandy, Northern France and Belgium, and was with the regiment that liberated Paris. He was discharged as a captain in 1946.\

Dirouhi Kouymjian Highgas was born in Konia, Turkey. In 1925 she married William Highgas, an American business-man in international trade. They had three children.