Phonetic spelling for MacinTalk Pro

Happy new year again,

I'm writing a simple app in hyperCard to help my wife's elementary
school students learn phonics faster and more happily.

The students can check the accuracy of their answers by listening to
Macintalk Pro read the words back. It does a pretty good job, most of
the time, but sometimes mispronouces vowels. The hard "a" (as in "bat")
is a particular problem. Sometimes, it pronounces it as a soft a (as in
"waffle") when it shouldn't. These problems could be corrected, if I
could figure out how to spell certain words phonetically.

For instance, in "wab"(the program uses nonsense words at times),
MacinTalk pronounces it as if it were "wob". I cant figure out how to
force it to pronounce the hard a instead of the soft one.

I found some web pages regarding phonetic spelling for text to speech
engines, but they don't seem to work for Macintalk Pro, unless I'm
missing something.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,


Tim