ALSA problem on Raspberry Pi

Here is a repost of a previous thread which I was unable to resolve.
I get the following error msgs when trying to to

espeak "hello, world"

on a Raspberry Pi under OpenWrt - it doesn't happen under Raspbian

ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.front
ALSA lib pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear

Is there something I need to install/configure to stop these errors?