Tinnemore, AnnaThe number of people over 65 years old in the United States is rapidly growing as the generation known as “Baby Boomers” reaches this milestone. Currently, at least 16 million of these older adults struggle to communicate effectively because of disabling hearing loss. An increasing number of older adults with hearing loss are electing to receive a cochlear implant (CI) to partially restore their ability to communicate effectively. CIs provide access to speech information, albeit in a highly degraded form. This degradation can frequently make individual words unclear. While predictive sentence contexts can often be used to resolve individual unclear words, there are many factors that either enhance or diminish the benefit of sentence contexts. This dissertation presents three complementary studies designed to address some of these factors, specifically: (1) the location of the unclear word in the context sentence, (2) how much background noise is present, and (3) individual factors such as age and hearing loss. The first study assessed the effect of context for adult listeners with acoustic hearing when a target word is presented in different levels of background noise at the beginning or end of sentences that vary in predictive context. Both context sentences and target words were spectrally degraded as a simulation of sound processed by a CI. The second study evaluated how listeners with CIs use context under the same conditions of background noise, sentence position, and predictive contexts as the group with acoustic hearing. The third study used eye-tracking methodology to infer information about the real-time processing of degraded speech across ages in a group of people who had acoustic hearing and a group of people who used CIs. Results from these studies indicate that target words at the beginning of the context sentence are more likely to be interpreted to be consistent with the following context sentence than target words at the end of the context sentences. In addition, the age of the listener interacted with some of the other experimental variables to predict phoneme categorization performance and response times in both listener groups. In the study of real-time language processing, there were no significant differences in the gaze trajectories between listeners with CIs and listeners with acoustic hearing. Together, these studies confirm that older listeners can use context in a manner similar to younger listeners, although at a slower speed. These studies expand the field’s knowledge of the importance of an unclear word’s location within a sentence and draw attention to the strategies employed by individual listeners to use context. The results of these experiments provide vital data needed to assess the current usage of context in the aging population with CIs and to develop age-specific auditory rehabilitation efforts for improved communication.enDissertationAudiologyAgingAgingCochlear ImplantsCognitionEye trackingHearingSpeech Perception