A study analyzed three episodes of self-repetition in a 1-year-old's utterances and examined the child's use of self-repetition for exploiting and elaborating on his phonological system in the context of discourse. The subject was a first-born monolingual child in the Stanford Child Phonology project. The analysis provides clues about how the young child's phonological system is organized, and particularly how he handles the problem of massive formal variation in a systemic context, behaving as a phonological strategist and system-builder. It is argued that the child's phonological behavior in discourse reflects an ability to flexibly and resourcefully exploit available phonological options in the service of short-term and long-term functional objectives, both immediate communication needs and the construction and progressive elaboration of a phonological system for the articulation of words. (MSE)