It took him longer to be comfortable with tiny print and I'm thinking that a phonic based development would require better control of visual tracking skills than would be needed to recognize the whole words.
I wonder about this with my 2nd DD, who is learning to read at the moment. I think her biggest impediment to reading is tracking and visual skills. She simply refuses to attempt books with text too small, wrong font, on a coloured background. I am seeing quite a few reversals from the words she miss guesses I am pretty sure a lot of her decoding is not sounding out but prediction based on first and last letter and the picture.
