With the current acceleration of globalization and the increasing prominence of English as an international common language, the traditional English teaching mode is facing many challenges. The digital era has put forward higher requirements for language learning, and it is necessary to cultivate students’ intercultural communicative competence and critical thinking. This study investigates the impact of English teaching mode supported by generative artificial intelligence on the cognitive effects of language acquisition. Adopting a quasi-experimental research design, two classes of University S with a total of 89 students were selected as the research subjects, and 44 students in the experimental group and 45 students in the control group were set up to implement the English teaching mode based on generative artificial intelligence for the experimental group, and the control group adopted the traditional teaching method, for a one-semester long term tracking study. The cognitive effects of students’ language acquisition were measured through four dimensions: language thinking, language and culture cognition, language comprehension and language application. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups of students in each test before the experiment (P>0.05). After the experiment, the average scores of the experimental group in language thinking, language and culture cognition, language comprehension and language application reached 24.26, 23.41, 22.84 and 23.48 respectively, which were significantly higher than those of the control group of 16.03, 16.85, 15.67 and 16.11, and the difference between the groups was statistically significant (P<0.001). All the abilities of the experimental group were significantly improved compared to the preexperiment, while there was no significant change in the control group. The study shows that generative artificial intelligence technology can effectively improve the cognitive effect of students' English language acquisition, which provides an important reference for the innovation of English teaching.
