I have seen a 1 year old seeing a drawing and then correctly tapping the three letter CVC word (among four CVC words) that matches enough times in a row that I could reject the null hypothesis with near certainty. I have seen 2 year olds who had learned to verbally sound out words in games transfer that ability to read entire sentences and short books.
To add to your point, albeit from memory, I read here some time ago on the topic of losing the diaper at 12 months, and one technique discussed was to introduce hand signals, as communication ability of kids comes /way/ earlier than the mouth coordination required to talk. So it stands to reason that if you don’t require the kid to read /aloud/, reading as pattern recognition can come earlier.