running function pyttsx3 text to speech causing application to close

Question

I am running text to speech function each time an Italian word is being inserted into a listbox. Sometimes python script fails, after pronouncing all the words. Sometimes after pronouncing all the words all the insertions into listbox are done and nothing fails. Since words are inserted into the listbox via a loop, one would expect a word followed by its pronunciation, since the parla_italiano() is called on each word. But it seems that the function is holding the other python thread. I have never worked with threads yet. It there is a way of releasing this function after pronouncing a word, and allowing the word insertion into the listbox? I am using python 3.9 on windows10

def parla_italiano(phrase):
    import pyttsx3
    engine = pyttsx3.init() 
    it_voice_id = r"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\TTS_MS_IT-IT_ELSA_11.0"
    engine.setProperty('voice', it_voice_id)
    engine.say(phrase)
    engine.runAndWait()

This is the error message:

Fatal Python error: PyEval_RestoreThread: the function must be called with the GIL held, but the GIL is released (the current Python thread state is NULL)
Python runtime state: initialized