representations. Those with congenital amusia show impaired performance on discrimination, identification and imitation of sentences with intonational differences in pitch direction in their final word. This suggests that amusia can in subtle ways impair language processing. Social and emotional Amusic individuals have a remarkable sparing of emotional responses to music in the context of severe and lifelong deficits in processing music. Some individuals with amusia describe music as unpleasant. Others simply refer to it as noise and find it annoying. This can have social implications because amusics often try to avoid music, which in many social situations is not an option. In China and other countries where tonal languages are spoken, amusia may have a more pronounced social and emotional impact: difficulty in speaking and understanding the language. However, context clues are often strong enough to determine the correct meaning, similarly to how homophones can be understood. Related diseases Amusia has been classified as a learning disability that affects musical abilities. Research suggests that in congenital amusia, younger subjects can be taught tone differentiation techniques. This finding leads researchers to believe that amusia is related to dyslexia and other similar disorders. Research has been shown that amusia may be related to an increase in size of the cerebral cortex, which may be a result of a malformation in cortical development. Conditions such as dyslexia and epilepsy are due to a malformation in cortical development and also lead to an increase in cortical thickness, which leads researchers to believe that congenital amusia may be caused by the identical phenomenon in a different area of the brain. Amusia is also similar to aphasia in that they affect similar areas of the brain near the temporal lobe. Most cases of those with amusia do not show any symptoms of aphasia. However, a number of cases have shown that those who have aphasia can exhibit symptoms of amusia, especially in acquired aphasia. The two are not mutually exclusive and having one does not imply possession of the other. In acquired amusia, inability to perceive music correlates with an inability to perform other higher-level functions. In this case, as musical ability improves, so too do the higher cognitive functions which suggests that musical ability is closely related to these higher-level functions, such as memory and learning, mental flexibility, and semantic fluency. Amusia can also be related to aprosody, a disorder in which the person's speech