Do pictures help young children read (understand meaning) better or does it give them a delayed sense of imagination when decoding information? I have started to read a book called "Vexed Texts: How Children's Picture Books Promote Illiteracy" by Pamela Protheroe and her belief is that images promotes illiteracy. There seems far too much evidence that pictures books aid children in a vast amount of ways.

But, it did make me wonder on children's dependency of what they see in comparison to what they imagine. My investigation is to find out children's understanding of the words and what they see internally without the visual cues.
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.