yes!! this page specifically is a study in reduced sounds, and it’s because of things like these that ESL’s think we talk so fast. we’re shortcutting the language without even realizing it, and it happens on so many levels, from sentences to syllables.
as for sentence level, there are two categories of words—content words and function words. they’re pretty self-explanatory; content words are your nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, whereas function words are the words that don’t mean anything, like conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, etc.) and articles (the, a[n]). prepositions vary depending on the language.
you’ll notice that function words are the ones most commonly reduced, and that’s literally because they don’t mean anything. the only value they bring to the sentence is grammatical, and when we speak, we’re trying to get our meaning across. you can hear it in our intonation.
“He GOT an F in ENGLISH.” or, as it’s more commonly said, “He got’n ef’n English.” because we talk like this, ESL’s tend to not pick up function words at first. but because function words don’t mean anything, that’s also why if an ESL said “Yesterday I go store,” we know exactly what they mean (which makes teaching the importance of function words difficult, but that’s for a different post).
as for syllabic level, if you look at “more or less,” we say it like “morr less.” the “or” gets reduced because it’s repetitive—we already say it in “more,” so physically it’s easier for our mouth to elongate the “R” sound rather than repeating it.
PS. this is not just an English thing, either. every language has its own short cuts that native speakers use and don’t realize. to any second/foreign language learner, their target language will sound ridiculously fast until they learn the shortcuts.
tl;dr - language is lazy, and will do anything it can to avoid repetition
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