Since even before Lindau’s Story of /r/, the search for a single phonetic (acoustic or articulatory) characteristic which defines rhotics as a class has met with little success [13]. In light of an alternative way of conceptualizing the vocal tract [6, 7], however, this paper proposes that there is indeed an articulatory basis for classifying at least some phonologically rhotic speech sounds as phonetically rhotic insofar as they necessarily involve some degree of constriction or expansion of the pharynx. This paper further proposes a model (Fig. 1) of rhotic association parameters which builds on Lindau’s 1985 [13] model by providing for the contribution of the laryngeal vocal tract to the production of r-like sounds.