All wireless receivers have some degree of nonlinearity that can negatively impact performance. Two major effects from this nonlinearity are power compression, which leads to amplitude and phase distortions in the received signal, and desensitization caused by a high powered interfering signal at an adjacent channel. As the RF spectrum becomes more crowded, the interference caused by these adjacent signals will become a more significant problem for receiver design. Therefore, having bit and symbol error rate expressions that take the receiver nonlinearity into account will allow for determining the linearity requirements of a receiver. This thesis examines the modeling of the probability density functions of M-PAM and M-QAM signals through an AWGN channel taking into account the impact of receiver nonlinearity. A change of variables technique is used to provide a relationship between the pdf of these signals with a linear receiver and the pdf with a nonlinear receiver. Additionally, theoretical bit and symbol error rates are derived from the pdf expressions. Finally, this approach is extended by deriving pdf and error rate expressions for these signals when nearby blocking signals cause desensitization of the signal of interest. Matlab simulation shows that the derived expressions for a nonlinear receiver have the same accuracy as the accepted expressions for linear receivers. / Master of Science / All wireless receivers have some amount of nonlinearity that can distort a received signal and impact performance. For amplitude modulated signals, the power compression caused by the nonlinear receiver will cause distortions in the amplitude and phase of the received signal. Additionally, a high powered interfering signal at a close frequency can decrease the gain and distort the received signal. This thesis examines how the probability density of an amplitude modulated signal with a nonlinear receiver can be modeled for both of these situations. These theoretical probability density functions are used to derive theoretical error rate expressions for the signals both with and without the adjacent channel interference. Simulations in Matlab show that the accuracy of these derived expressions is similar to the accuracies of the linear receiver expressions. These derived expressions will be able to remove the need for time consuming simulation when designing receivers for wireless systems.