Picture overload hinders children's word learning from storybooks. While publishers look to produce ever more colourful and exciting texts to entice buyers, University of Sussex psychologists have shown that having more than one illustration per page results in poorer word learning among pre-schoolers. Source 4j.
When I was in the final year of primary school, I saw this first hand. As part of peer support I was in a group assisting kindergarteners with learning to read. The boy I was assigned had remembered the story purely though the pictures and recited it by sight. Perhaps he was a visual learner or more artistic, but there is nobody who wouldn't benefit from literacy. In my opinion, the earlier, the better.
Books without pictures are boring. Even if the book is really good its nice to see some artwork every now and again. People may disagree but the art kind of ensures that what I'm imagining from reading is along the same lines of what the author is saying.
Yes having some pictures as one is developing to read can help a person learn to read better. After the picture and word association is mastered go to a picture with a sentence under it. Like the Dick and Jane books. This helps them learn more words and you can keep working up to a story with some pictures until you have few if any pictures in a book.
Yes, exactly the strategy needed to help children learn to read. I started my girl with a book that had a picture and a single word under it, dog with a picture of a dog, fish with picture of a fish. That helped her relate what the written word was and then what sounds the letter were. Then we moved on to short sentences, etc. The key was the pictures.