This is not any kind of serious linguistic theory this is just me spitballing based on personal experience but I feel like speaking a romance language as a first language gives you an unfair advantage in those "if you know this word you have better vocabulary than 80% of English speakers" tests. Like the tests that give you a word in English and ask you to choose either an antonym or a synonym or an antonym and the words get increasingly obscure.
I remember doing those several times in my life and it always put me in like the 98th or 99th percentile, and one of them even was like "your vocabulary is equivalent to that of a college professor" and I always found it weird I scored so high.
But now that I think about it, a lot of the words towards the later half of the test were latin-derived words that are uncommon in English and used almost exclusively in a technical or formal register, while their equivalent cognate in Spanish has a similar meaning but is much more common in everyday use, and that's why a lot of them which would have probably been relatively unfamiliar to a lot of native English speakers seemed completely familiar and intuitive to me.
Like e.g. at least in my experience with both languages, the average English speaker probably encounters the word "facilitate" a lot less often than the average Spanish speaker encounters the word "facilitar". Same with "commence" and "comenzar", or "terminate" and "terminar", or "respond" and "responder".
