This article investigated how network growth algorithms-preferential attachment, preferential acquisition, and lure of the associates-relate to the acquisition of words in the phonological language network, where edges are placed between words that are phonologically similar to each other. Through an archival analysis of age-of-acquisition norms from English and Dutch and word learning experiments, we examined how new words were added to the phonological network. Across both approaches, we found converging evidence that an inverse variant of preferential attachment-where new nodes were instead more likely to attach to existing nodes with few connections-influenced the growth of the phonological network. We suggest that the inverse preferential attachment principle reflects the constraints of adding new phonological representations to an existing language network with already many phonologically similar representations, possibly reflecting the pressures associated with the processing costs of retrieving lexical representations that have many phonologically similar competitors. These results contribute toward our understanding of how the phonological language network grows over time and could have implications for the learning outcomes of individuals with language disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).