It has been considered nowadays that the text meaning is a many-layer phenomenon with a complex number of factors having influence on it. To concentrate on these problems, the level of short story comprehension predominant in different age groups was chosen as the focus of the study. The empirical research included three age groups, the eleven, fifteen and twenty year-olds, consisting of 24 persons each. They were provided with the text considered to be both attractive to all the groups and stimulating wide range of interpretations. The respondents were induced to interpret separate fragments of the story as well as the whole of it. Two independent judges identified each interpretation according to the following criteria: a comprehender's c...