Abstract
Older adults’ lexical networks often appear sparser than those of younger adults, a pattern typically interpreted as evidence of cognitive decline. The enrichment model instead proposes that lifelong experience creates richer lexical representations in which associative strength is distributed across more weak connections. Across two stimulation studies, we examine this model and the limits of methodological inference when studying free association networks. Study 1 reproduced empirical aging data, showed that lifelong learning enriched networks with age, leading to more distributed free associations that appear as an enrichment of weak associations with age. Study 2 demonstrated that these patterns depended on participant sample size and lexicon size. In particular, increasing the number of participants reduced or reversed apparent age-related sparsity by revealing weak and infrequently observed associations. This also follows the logic of ecological studies that call for increased sampling when rare species may be undersampled. Overall, these findings suggest that aging enriches and redistributes associative strength across a broader lexical network and that observed sparsity may reflect methodological limitations rather than a genuine loss of lexical connectivity.