Sure, it can. But explicit knowledge like that tends to be slower (in processing) than implicit knowledge (once you know it instinctively). Lots of tricks like that helps linguists (and others who are interested by grammar) to learn a language at the beginning. Others who don't know anything about that will probably eventually develop some intuitive pattern-matching sense (at least for some relatively consistent and frequent) correspondences though they won't necessarily be aware of it. Interestingly some adults do that, and sort of only that, and never reach that implicit (fluent/nativelike) stage. Children, though they can also learn explicitly if taught in that way, tend to learn implicitly (and they're the ones who become native speakers).

Not that specifically, but there is a lot of research on implicit/explicit instruction in general. This is a very nice dissertation about the topic: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/34241

Also, what exactly do you think about phonics?

It's a way to pretend that English spelling makes sense. It's somewhat useful, but it has also been shown that, for example, some Chinese learners of English memorize English word-spellings as if they are Chinese characters (not as individual letters) and that they succeed (relatively to other learners) at learning 'spelling'. In other words, English spelling is too disconnected from 'phonetic spelling' to necessarily be learned that way, although it also helps. So, in short, phonics is an attempt to deal with broken English spelling. And in that, it's ok.