Articulatory explanations are often proposed to account for many of the phonetic patterns found in speech beyond the citation form. Unscripted material from Suffolk English and North German is used to argue that articulatory explanation can too tightly constrain our expectations of the types of phonetic patterns which spontaneous speech contains. It is also shown how articulatory explanation can offer an adequate account of a dataset, stopping short of revealing a larger, more complex set of phonetic patterns.