Do pictures help young children read (understand meaning) better or does it give them a delayed sense of imagination when decoding information?
I wrote Vexed Texts a long time ago. Since then I have asked the same question and found no research on it, so I did my own research as my doctoral thesis. You can find the results if you want to in my published thesis (I received my PhD from Victoria University in Wellington New Zealand). The title is: The Effect of Illustrations on the Ability of Children to Draw Inferences while reading Narrative Texts.