If you think about it, the role of decoding in the learning of the word
identification processes is paramount.
Indeed, decoding allows (one) to read all the regular words and
parts of the irregular words.
Think about the irregular words like 'said',
the 's', the correspondence between the 's', and
the 's', and the 'd' and the 'd' are regular.
... ... there are French studies showing that children who score better for
pseudoword reading are the one(s) who have the better overall reading score.
Which means that when they understand the phonological decoding path,
when they use the phonological decoding path,
which is the one you have to use for pseudowords,
you get better score in overall for reading abilities.
And also, these studies show that children who make more mistakes of regularization
of irregular words, for example, reading 'said 'as 'sayeed',