Yeah - that Scaladoc entry could probably be more helpful.
Another useful source of documentation is the Scala Documentation site, which has this to say about reduceLeft:
xs reduceLeft op
Apply binary operation op between successive elements of non-empty collection xs, going left to right.
So what it does is reduce a collection to a single value by successively applying a binary operator. Some examples:
scala> Array(1, 2, 3, 4) reduceLeft (_ + _)
res2: Int = 10
scala> Array("foo", "bar", "baz") reduceLeft (_ + _)
res3: String = foobarbaz