Maintaining stability of perception in everyday environments is a key task which the perceptual system must undertake. Rarely do we receive auditory signals in optimum conditions; transient noises ranging from background chatter, traffic noise and coughs, to doors slamming and babies crying all have the potential to momentarily mask signals of interest such as speech and music. The operation of ‘sensory repair’ mechanisms that work to fill-in missing or disrupted perceptual input are well-documented in adults, but more recent work has found evidence for the operation of these repair mechanisms in a wider range of listeners (children, non-human animals) and in a variety of sensory domains (visual perception, speech perception, music perception, tactile perception, sign language and written language). In the auditory domain, ‘perceptual restoration’ refers to the filling in of missing or disrupted auditory input given sufficient contextual information and appropriate acoustic conditions. The findings from a series of empirical studies will be presented, which demonstrate that sensory repair mechanisms develop with age, and that there are important acoustic constraints on the operation of auditory perceptual restoration that limit its operation to only those conditions where ‘filling in’ missing information is the ecologically-relevant thing to do. Most importantly, the findings demonstrate that perception is context-dependent; identification of auditory stimuli in noisy conditions relies on different information to that in optimal conditions. The implications of these findings, both theoretical and practical, will be discussed.