Do you think it's worth asking for referral for a hearing test?

[CrunchyFrog]

DS1 has HFA. He's 6.

He copes in mainstream school without extra support (has visual timetable he manages with teacher help.)

The reason he was dx'd with HFA and not AS is that his speech was late in developing and has disordered phonology.

He had adenoids out 2 years ago due to constant infection, which cured his snoring but did nothing for the speech.

It's better, it's slowly improving, it's 90% intelligible - but he sounds very strange. I'm worried about bullying, I'm worried that at 6 the sounds may be "stuck" and I just thought last night - maybe he isn't hearing them right in the first place?

He had 2 hearing tests at 2 years, then was DX's with SPD (this was changed to HFA at 4) and no more was said about the hearing. Those tests came out as normal.

He is getting ASD specific SALT (6 weeks a year) but nothing phonology specific ATM. I didn't find it very valuable tbh, as it was just stuff we were doing anyway.

WDYT?

It would be worth having his hearing tested definitely if only to rule out hearing loss as a factor in his speech delay/disorder. It would also be worth getting an opinion or referral on about auditory processing disorder (where child can physically hear the sounds but has difficulty processing the meaning of what they hear effectively) as there is often an overlap with asd. Also some symptom overlap between hearing loss and asd - at 3 ds (now diagnosed with asd and adhd) had glue ear and mild hearing loss and this masked some of the asd symptoms that we and school were then slow to pick up on.