The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specifc picture and word combination, various efects, including the identity facilitation efect (e.g., DOG+dog) and the semantic interference efect (e.g., GOAT+cow), are often observed. The response patterns of the picture-word task in terms of naming latencies refect the mechanisms underlying lexical selection in speech production. Research using this method, however, has typically focused on alphabetic languages, or involved bilingual populations, making it difcult to specifcally investigate orthographic efects in isolation. In this paper, we report fve experiments investigating the role of orthography in the picture-word task by varying distractor script (using the multiscriptal language Japanese, and pseudohomophonic spellings in English) across three diferent populations (Japanese monolinguals, Japanese-English bilinguals, and English monolinguals), investigating both the identity facilitation efect and the semantic interference efect. The results generally show that the magnitude of facilitation is afected by orthography even within a single language. The findings and specifc patterns of results are discussed in relation to current theories on speech production.