With the development of artificial intelligence technology, the learning mode of “artificial intelligence + education” has become the direction of the times. Through a questionnaire survey on students’ vocabulary learning strategies and taking students of a middle school as the research object, the study explores the level of strategy use in English vocabulary learning in terms of the frequency of strategy use and the differences in strategy use among students of different levels. On this basis, the way of English word sense processing with the assistance of artificial intelligence is summarized and the word association memory model is proposed. And two classes in a middle school are selected for teaching experiments to apply the word association memory model to English vocabulary learning and explore the effect of the model on students’ word memory. Overall the cognitive strategy (3.489) and resource strategy (3.477) of English vocabulary learning are used more frequently. The English vocabulary level model of the students in the experimental class increased after the teaching experiment, which was 8.05 points higher than that of the control class and still 5.118 points higher than that of the control class in the delayed test, reflecting the vocabulary learning effect and durability of the word association memory model. Students can improve their language cognitive learning skills in three aspects: metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and communicative/influential strategies, which further promote the development of English proficiency.